A K-12 Dance Method to Teach Creative Dance, English, Math and Science

This book provides a hands-on dance teaching method for teachers in pre-school and elementary school, inclusive education and after-school extra curriculum activity, with or without earlier experience of teaching dance, who want to imply dance in their everyday pedagogical work. Numerous exercises and lesson outlines are described to teach creative dance, and dance integrated in the teaching of English, mathematics and natural sciences. The carefully designed dance method applied is firmly anchored in contemporary educational theory and dance educational practice, as described in the book’s initial chapter, underscoring why working in an art mode like dance highly matters to education. The theoretical framework is informed by educational theorist Gert Biesta's ideas on letting art teach, subject-ness and democracy, progressive educationalist John Dewey's thinking on art as experience, democracy and education, and dance educator and scholar Susan Stinson’s stances on kinaesthetic experience and dancing as becoming. With its abundance of examples and its overall celebration of dance and the work of the senses, this work constitutes both a powerful argument for aesthetic teaching and a rich tool to create space in young people’s education for dance as a specific and indispensable source of expertise and mode of dialogue with the social and natural world. Dancing and discovering the magical world of movement, children and students open their senses to a world of insight, meaning and knowledge – letting dance teach.