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Dance Education Blog

NDEO's "Dance Education" Blog features articles written by NDEO members about dance and dance education topics as well as periodic updates on NDEO programs and services. This is a FREE resource available to ALL.

Archive by year: 2023Return
By Ella Rosewood, Crelata® Founder & CEO ~~ Most K-12 students don’t have access to dance education. If students are lucky enough to have a dance teacher at their school, the classes that are available are often restricted to the teacher’s personal knowledge. This means that the small subsection of students in public schools with access to dance education may only get lessons in a few dance styles...
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By Nancy Romita and Allegra Romita ~~ In many forms of dance the breath support for movement is not an integral part of training. It is not perceived to be important in the same manner that stretching, strengthening, and balance warrant focus. Little coaching and training time addresses breath support in most Western dance forms. We propose breath support is at the heart of expressivity and artistry in movement phrasing.Teachers may verbally coach students to hold the abdomen in so tightly the a...
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By Pascal Rekoert, Assistant Professor and Dance Education Program Director at Central Connecticut State University ~~ As teachers, we spend endless time lesson planning, pondering the needs and joys of our students, and looking into our proverbial crystal ball. This process prioritizes our direct future, but what about the life learnings we implicitly share with our students? What about the distant future, the professional legacy we leave behind? My summer was a period laden with loss and—i...
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By Christine Mazeppa, Adjunct Professor of Dance at University of Miami ~~ As an avid reader and writer who has spent the last eighteen years teaching dance and language arts to high school students, I have long been fascinated by the effects of language and literature on movement. The connection between the two subjects is so present for me that it is often difficult to teach one subject without drawing from the other. My approach to teaching dance is much the same way I would teach my language...
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By Gina D'Antonio-Spears, Dance Educator, Portage Park Elementary, Chicago Public Schools ~~ When I was growing up in Raleigh NC back in the 1980’s, I did not discover that dance was taught in K-12 schools until I started high school. When I began high school, I learned that our prestigious magnet school offered dance, and I knew I had to go there. I was surrounded by high achieving students who wanted to become doctors and lawyers, but the reason I was there was because I wanted to dance. ...
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By Wendy Masterson, MSME/T, RSDE, MFA ~~ The similarity yet diversity of our experiences with cancer helped us to clarify that our pathways were neither right nor wrong, sometimes based on fear, but always with the potential to deepen intrinsic knowledge of our selves. Our experiences acted as a catalyst in exploring the effects of cancer on people who identify themselves through their ability to move and express themselves through that movement. Cancer diagnosis was only the first step of many ...
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By Ruth Arena, Adjunct Professor at Le Moyne College and Faculty at The Ballet & Dance Center ~~ Dancers strive to listen, respond, explore, and seek deeper understanding of the mysterious connection between the physical and mental/emotional/spiritual self. For most, this connection is porous, constantly fluctuating as self-knowledge increases. My cancer diagnosis presented new learning opportunities and forced me to delineate between body and mind in order to communicate with others: doctors, f...
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By Alyssa Thostesen, Dance Facilitator, Arts Access Program at Matheny ~~ From accepting identities outside of the gender binary to celebrating diverse body shapes, abilities, and aesthetics, the dance world has been slowly embracing the idea of otherness in studios and performance. We, as a community, have taken major steps towards inclusion since the early years of codified dance that were fixated on appearance and sought perfection found in the ideal dancer physique through years of exploring...
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By Melissa Greenblatt, NDEO Managing Director ~~ There are nearly 100,000 public PreK-12 schools in the United States employing just over 3 million teachers who are educating more than 50 million students according to the National Center for Education Statistics. We know anecdotally that many of these schools offer classes in the arts, including dance, theater, music, visual art and media arts. However, previous attempts to collect data about these programs and the students served faced unique c...
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By Alek Paliński, Dancer, McDonald Selznick Associates ~~ From the beginning of my dance and teaching career in my native Poland, I’ve been working in the commercial dance industry. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles in 2015 that I realized the full scope of opportunities for dance on television and film. In Poland, dance on camera was limited to shows like SYTYCD, Dancing With The Stars, or X Factor. In contrast, the U.S. has a plethora of dance genres for scripted TV and fi...
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By Anne Dunkin, NDEO's DELRdi Coordinator ~~ The DELRdi is a searchable dance education database that contains an index of over 9,000 journal articles, theses/dissertations, conference , government reports, independent research and papers, standards and curriculum, newsletters, historical papers, blogs, syllabi, and online postings. In this blog post, NDEO’s DELRdi Coordinator Anne Dunkin presents at what the DELRdi is and how it can benefit you as a dance educator, researcher, or student...
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By Naima Prevots, Professor Emerita at American University and current Professor in NDEO's Online Professional Development Institute (OPDI) ~~ In 2021, I developed a course for NDEO’s Online Professional Development Program called OPDI 122: “Celebrating Voices of Contemporary Choreographers: Applications to Teaching, Learning, and Appreciation.” In this blog post, I want to share ideas about the last unit in this course, “Voices of Immigrant and Indigenous Artists.” In this two week cou...
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By Heather Harrington, Dance Faculty at Kean University ~~ The first time I heard a student of mine refer to dance as “the industry” was in 2015. Maybe she saw me physically recoil before saying, “not all dance falls under the category of industry.” My recoil was rooted in my reluctance to see the pursuit of dance as “a manufacturing activity or a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises” (Merriam-Webster). During feedback sessions in my composition classes, as I began to ...
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By Deepa Mahadevan, Research Scholar ~~ Is there something like pure aesthetics untainted by politics? This article explores the discomfort faced by researchers immersed in practice when critical research apparently conflicts with content. The author reflects on questions that arose when she participated in the choreographic process of Maya Kulkarni, New York based award winning choreographer...
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By Caitlin Barfield, Independent Dance Instructor ~~ Let’s talk about teaching philosophies. It has taken me years of training and teaching to come into my own pedagogical style. You must understand that as a young dancer, I was pushed to my limit and then some. While I was training to be a professional dancer, I found myself at the end of my rope time and time again. Overworked, burned out, and beaten down - not to mention the psychological trauma of it all, too...
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