A Call to Arms: Dance Education
In difficult, uncertain financial times, hard choices have to be made about where scarce dollars should be spent. As we consider the certainty of budget cuts in the coming years, it is valuable to remind ourselves of the importance of dance education and the arts as a whole in our public K-12 school system. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) gives primacy to testing English/language arts, mathematics and science, leaving other subjects, and most particularly the arts, precariously perched. Despite the arts being listed as core academic material by NCLB, these programs have historically been among the first cut in a school budget when the going gets tough. Further, dance hits the bottom of the arts list, often being the least understood and researched.
In the ’70s, a particularly difficult time for arts education, a new kind of arts education organization emerged in an effort to fill the void in public education. These organizations allowed schools to outsource their arts education by bringing in teaching artists. The Lincoln Center Institute is just one example of hundreds of such organizations that now exist. Many offer excellent, if not superb, programs. At the very least, these organizations offer exposure to the arts and a line of inquiry into the subject at hand. However, this outsourcing leaves no set curriculum within the school itself and leaves the school system utterly dependent on the quality of what is available.
To ensure inclusion of the arts, as well as their worth, within the myopic, result-driven, quantitative approach to learning, arts educators tried to keep the arts alive by using a multidisciplinary approach. They went into the language arts, math and science classrooms setting out assignments for the students that allowed them to see how the arts related to their other subjects. While there were advantages to this approach, it did not support the arts as subjects worthy of being taught unto themselves. This is most evident when it comes to dance. As a dance educator, I have supported multidisciplinary approaches, arguing strongly that a dance education not only requires analytical, methodological and developmental skills, but mathematical and physical skills as well, and that we can easily teach how to write good sentences through the use of dance composition. Mathematics is very much a part of the music we listen to in a dance class; music is an element in time, and time can be divided in countless ways. Dance is a physics class in motion.
Going one step further, we tout the merits of dance and an arts education as a critical component to the betterment of test scores and student success rates, whether this is provable as a direct causal effect or not. Go to the National Dance Education Organization’s website (NDEO) to see Hillary Clinton substantiating these ideas in an online video. Instinctually we agree and can point to case after case in which we think this is so. Despite the lack of scientific data to back up that claim, we cannot deny that arts integration offers enrichment to any curriculum.
Yet these ancillary benefits of arts education are not the sole measure of success. “Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts,” an article commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and published in 2004 by the RAND Corporation, proposes that we look at the “intrinsic” values of arts education. For dance educators, this means that we must ask ourselves: what are the merits of a dance education? Dance teachers and their students live the answer to this question fervently on a daily basis. But how do we explain our answer to non-dancers? We must be able to articulate plainly what it is that students learn through dance.
Joan Finkelstein, director of dance programs for the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), agrees. Finkelstein’s response was to ask this question: “What do we do as dance artists that is authentic to our art form?” She posed it to an enormous panel of dance artists and educators who acted as a think tank to create the NYCDOE’s “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts: Dance PreK-12.” A superb document, it serves as a model for other dance education programs and should be on every dance educator’s reading list, whether teaching K-12 or privately. It was based on the work of her colleagues Nancy Shankman and Barbara Gurr who headed committees to create the music and visual arts “Blueprints” that established the “Five Strands of Learning in the Arts,” which for dance are:
- Dance Making - Developing Dance Literacy - Making Connections - Working with Community and Cultural Resources - Exploring Careers and Lifelong Learning.
Under Finkelstein’s leadership, these five strands spawned an intricate, age-appropriate and sequential educational path that purposely steers away from being prescriptive to allow individual schools and teachers the freedom to reach quantifiable outcomes in any number of ways. “I think of it as a beautiful tapestry woven together, and then we pull out the strands to see all the colors,” says Finkelstein. Using her metaphor, the document is indeed colorful. Dance becomes a subject worthy of study unto itself – finally. We are late bloomers in comparison to the rest of the arts, especially the visual arts and music, but we are getting there.
So, what is it that students learn from a dance education? Dance allows children to develop not only physically, but cognitively, socially and emotionally. It generates the art of performance and the craft of creating, both of which lead to the subject of aesthetics. In turn, aesthetics leads to a need for understanding context, cultural implications and a sense of dance history. What constitutes excellence comes into play with the skillfully honed analysis and criticism of one’s own work and the work of others. Ambiguity and the possibility of having more than one solution become realities. Investigation, collaboration, tolerance and a sense of community are all at play. And the actualization of dance requires the student to be constantly evaluative, systematic and diagnostic, to use short-term and long-term memory to access intricate combinations, to exercise acute spatial awareness and to apply it all against a musical phrase. These skills must be applied instantaneously against auditory sensory functions, prioritized and spit back out through the body to remain in time with the music. There are not too many exercises given in any classroom that require a student to be analytical, methodological, mathematical, sequential and physical simultaneously and within an exacting time frame. Nonetheless, can we measure the outcomes? Finkelstein believes we can. The Arts Office is working on school accountability for arts education through the ArtsCount initiative, and teacher-generated assessments aligned with the “Blueprint” will be created this year. However, in the dance education field as a whole, assessment is where there is still much work to do.
We also have much to do in employing more qualified dance teachers. In the New York City system, only 14 percent of the schools have at least one full-time dance teacher. Of the over 500 full- or part-time dance teachers Finkelstein oversees, fewer than 200 are certified to teach dance. “A full-time dance educator on faculty can most effectively ensure a sequential dance curriculum,” she says acknowledging that the certification pipeline into the profession needs to be more robust.
New York is but one of many states; North Carolina has been a leader in arts education; so has Ohio. New Mexico has a very well thought out set of standards for all four arts disciplines. There are numerous others who have developed dance curriculum guidelines. We need to be proactive in keeping the momentum of this work moving forward without stalling out because of finances.
Many undergraduate dance departments have reputable dance education programs. Even if the goal is to become a performer, dance students might consider adding this course work on the chance that they may someday wish to teach. The same is true for graduate studies. Studio owners might consider certification to teach at their local K-12 schools while the studio is slow in the morning hours and/or creating a dance education program to be outsourced. Many dance companies and performance venues across the country already offer such programs.
Every child, regardless of socio-economic background, should be granted the opportunity to learn about dance, music, art and drama as worthy subjects alongside their language arts, math and science curriculum. If this premise is accepted, it becomes mandatory to include dance in the curricula of our public school systems. It would be an enormous disservice if the financial crisis of our nation and our government policy-making forced cuts out of our control.
“Dance by its very nature is a social art form; we dance with other people. We make our art in the world and our art affects the world. Our palette is people and our canvas is the stage. An education in the arts and through the arts is an essential part of a child’s education,” Finkelstein says firmly. Let’s not lose sight of this as we face budget cuts in the years to come.