"Dancing Beyond Aesthetics"
In societies and cultures around the world, we have witnessed the ability of art to captivate and inspire people for social change. Many of our most beloved pioneers and current practitioners were successful in their ability to intertwine their soul and their body. Cultivating students who can exceed expectations in the physicality and rigor of dance but are unequipped to use dance as a mechanism for positive impact is a fail. As our classrooms become increasingly more global, now is the time to implement multicultural and social justice values into our dance pedagogies. As educators, we are keenly aware that as we educate the whole child, we have the responsibility to consider children coming from different backgrounds. In cultivating equity and access, it is imperative that we as educators provide a more comprehensive curriculum so that we are impacting all of our students and also attracting a more diverse student population in the field of dance. We must re-frame what is the standard of dance education and include instruction in various cultural forms and lifelong lessons in social consciousness. There is a movement in literature to provide texts that resemble the lives of our students, and dance education is on the pathway to providing the same type of curriculum to our students. Access to dance curriculum includes not only its availability, but diversification of genres, collaborative possibilities, and advancement opportunities. There is much debate on whether multicultural education is truly effective and can actually improve student’s performance. The benefit of reshaping dance education curriculum into a more diversified subject is to ensure we are teaching and reaching the whole child. Ideally, dance education can bridge gaps between physical education, fine arts, and the humanities. Dancing beyond Aesthetics is written to continue the discourses about teaching dance beyond simply aesthetic principles and offer practical ways to implement social justice into curriculum particularly for K-12 students. Dancing beyond Aesthetics provides a less invasive approach to the implementation of multicultural education and social justice into our present dance pedagogies.
We are proud to currently be in-residence at "On Time Grad Academy" in Houston ISD.
To learn more about Dancing beyond Aesthetics contact us at [email protected].