DANZ QUARTERLY Issue No 13 – October, November, December 2008
Teaching Dance in New Zealand Schools
By Julie Cadzow
When I began working for Team Solutions as Primary Dance advisor for schools in the Auckland region in 2007,
I naively assumed that most primary schools were including dance in their teaching programmes. How wrong that assumption was! Instead, I found that dance was usually only taught when required for assembly items, school productions or cultural events, and often this involved specialist lunchtime groups rather than full class lessons.
I surveyed 122 teachers in 2007–2008 with the following results:
- 53 teachers (43%) had no idea what form dance in the curriculum might take
- 81 teachers (66%) never or only occasionally included dance activities within their daily programmes
- 59 % had never visited the Arts Online website
- Only 39% of teachers had visited the TKI website to access dance resources
- Only 33 teachers (23%) had used any of the Ministry of Education dance resources (such as the Discovering Dance DVD or Kiwi Kids Dance)
- The main reasons for teachers not including dance in their programmes included a lack of time, a lack of resources (or knowledge about where to access resources) and lack of pedagogical knowledge about dance.
Some teachers seemed to assume that dance in schools should ‘look like’ extra-curricular dance lessons, where students participate in formal dance training of a particular genre, such as ballet, jazz or tap. Unless a single teacher was willing to take responsibility for specialist lunchtime dance groups, most of the teachers I spoke to felt unqualified to teach dance, and it was left off the long-term planning completely. These teachers categorised dance as a single ‘silo’, unrelated to any other classroom activities.
With these results in mind, I realised that dance needed to become more accessible to primary school teachers. Therefore, I tried to show teachers ways to find time in their busy schedules for dance activities; that participation in dance can not only develop dance skills, but also enhance student learning in other areas; that they do not need to be expert dance practitioners to teach dance in schools; and that dance lessons do not have to culminate in full three-minute dances, complete with costumes and set designs.
My challenge to classroom teachers is to consider a change in thinking from a ‘silo’ teaching approach to a ‘colander’. Using the ‘silo’ approach, the learning is generally teacher-led and related only to a single outcome, such as a performance for an event.
With the image of a colander in mind, students are able to use learning from the teacher and other sources to participate in dance activities related to classroom work. They explore relevant ideas, concepts or issues with movement, and the new dance learning is used to enhance their overall knowledge. This may well include performing the work for others, with reflection about the stimulus, the process and the knowledge gained. The diagram below may explain this approach more clearly.
The following questions may help teachers to develop ‘colander’ thinking.
- How can the knowledge that students gain from an activity in a specific learning area be enhanced by the participation in activities from another learning area, such as dance?
- How are teachers helping their students to make connections between learning areas?
- How are teachers incorporating the Key Competencies and Values into their teaching programmes?
- How are teachers ensuring they provide multiple learning opportunities for their students?
I recently developed, for the Ministry of Education, three new teaching resources for dance, which can be accessed through Arts Online. These resources are designed to maintain and develop the integrity of dance, and to enhance learning in other relevant learning areas.
The first resource, entitled ‘Dancing the Key Competencies’, contains ten units of work for students of Years 1-10, and a ‘Dance Teachers’ Tool Kit’, a bank of modifiable resources to be used in the classroom. The units are designed to be progressions directly from the regular classroom programme, and each has a focus on one Key Competency. For example, ‘Caterpillar’s Day’ could enhance student learning in science about the life cycle of a butterfly and help to increase student recall and understanding of specific ‘life cycle’ vocabulary through exploration of movement.
‘Stretch it Out’ could be used as short activities to enhance a geometry unit in mathematics.
‘Dancing Poems’ could develop student’s understanding of a selected poem in a literacy programme.
The second resource is entitled ‘Dancing Treasures’ and contains five units of work for students of Years 8-11. The units are based on selected ‘assets’ or icons made available to The Learning Federation by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Unit One, ‘Dancing Treasures’, is a generic unit to be used with any of the assets. A personal treasure and a Te Papa ‘treasure’ are used as stimuli for dance.
Unit Two, ‘Dancing Flags’, involves students studying a range of flags from early New Zealand times. They have the opportunity to design their own flags with others and to create a dance using the new flags.
In ‘Weaving Pathways’, students use images of traditional Maori and Polynesian weaving patterns to create a dance based on the art of weaving.
‘Dance for Sustainability’ could extend an Education for Sustainability programme in a school, where students create a dance to highlight the need for the protection of our native fauna.
Finally, the unit entitled ‘Black Phoenix’ uses the dramatic sculpture, ‘Black Phoenix’, by Ralph Hotere to recreate the story of the sculpture with a class of human bodies.
The third resource, ‘Dancing Towards Respect’, was written to provide an example of how the ‘front end’ sections of the new curriculum document could be developed and explored through dance. The curriculum states that students will be encouraged to value respect for themselves, for others and for human rights. This resource does this through the art of dance by helping students develop an awareness of what respect means, to recognise and respond safely to their own emotions, to recognise the emotions of other people and to respond to the emotions of others with empathy.
The resource is in three parts, is focused on Levels 6-8 in the New Zealand Curriculum (students of Years 11-13), and includes NCEA Level One and Two Achievement Standards.
Part One is called ‘Respect for Yourself’. Students are taken on a movement journey where they identify characteristics of selected emotions and consider the idea of ‘balance’ as not only a still shape in dance but also as a sign of respect for themselves and something to be attained in their emotional lives.
‘Respect for Others’ explores respectful and disrespectful behaviours, and students create and perform counter-balances and weight-taking movements to represent the sharing of problems and being responsible for others. They can also discover facts about two highly respected New Zealanders who have made huge contributions to the development of dance in Aotearoa/New Zealand – Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Jon Trimmer.
The last unit, ‘Respect for Human Rights’, gives students the opportunity to gain knowledge about a human rights issue, to study three famous speeches written by human rights advocates and to create dance about making positive differences to the lives of others.
The three resources are an attempt to encourage dance teachers in both primary and secondary schools to use the ‘colander’ approach in their teaching. Secondary dance teachers can further develop this by questioning their students as to what novels or poems are being studied in English, what Social Studies issues are being discussed, what world events matter to them and their families, and then adapt their dance lessons and units to focus on them. In this way, we are maximising learning in a packed curriculum and making learning more relevant for students. There is always time for dance.
I hope teachers will see ways that this work could be used within their teaching programmes, used as a template to be adapted or modified to suit their own and their students’ needs, and as a stimulus to develop new work. I welcome feedback of any sort, and remind teachers of the goal of all of my work:
To enhance student learning, while maintaining the integrity of Dance.
Julie Cadzow j.cadzow@auckland.ac.nz
The three dance resources mentioned in this article can be found on the Arts Online Website:
http://arts.unitec.ac.nz/resources/units/dance_units.php
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