Just Dance
Just Dance
By Tessa Lofthouse, Carol Arcus and Diana Maliszewski
How does dance education happen in your school? In many elementary schools, dance is a prep delivery subject, taught by educators who are often “prep fairies”, with several responsibilities for multiple grades. While data exists about how many specialist teachers teach the other arts (46% for music as of 2018, 16% for visual arts, and 8% for dramatic arts) there is no data about how many specialist dance teachers are teaching in elementary public schools (People for Education, 2018). When dance isn’t your passion, how do you program effectively?
Non-specialist teachers might be tempted to turn to YouTube and have students copy the moves on an instructional video. This practice may appear to be an easy solution, as it does not require the instructor to be a proficient dancer with any background or experience. The authors of this article, who are associated with CODE (the Council of Dance and Drama Educators) and AML (the Association for Media Literacy) are keen to encourage educators to critically examine this practice, understand the problematic elements of it, and recommend alternatives that benefit everyone involved.
What is dance? What is dance education?
The challenge often takes shape in two dominant approaches grounded in preconceived notions of dance that are influenced by identity markers and social experiences with dance. They are also popular approaches that don’t align with the dance curriculum.
First, many folks are exposed to versions of dance that are aerobic like zumba and, as a result, they may think of dance as a form of fitness. This might lead teachers to assume that a program like “Just Dance” on YouTube is sufficient to meet the curriculum requirements for dance or to combine dance with the physical education curriculum. In fact, dance was included in the curriculum as part of the Physical Education curriculum until the 1990s. Dance was finally added to both the elementary and secondary Arts curriculum after an intensive national advocacy fax campaign in 1998 led by Jane Deluzio on behalf of CODE and widely supported by dance artists and organizations across Canada. This was reported in both The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail.1
Alternatively, teachers who have experience with studio dance or industry dance (e.g., National Ballet) might associate dance with aesthetic value and beauty. They might emphasize the importance of technical proficiency and work with students on learning the “steps”. Especially when engaging with cultural styles, these educators might assume that developing technical proficiency in dance vocabularies like hip hop, Bollywood, and grass dance is the goal. However, teaching these forms as cultural artefacts, separated from their contexts, can mean stripping them of their sacred value to specific communities or erasing the historical, political, and social resistances that these dance forms embody. This approach can reproduce colonial understandings of culture, encourage “tourist” pedagogies that treat some dance forms as “exotic” spectacles for consumption, or participate in co-optation which happens when something that originally had resistant, rebellious, or radical power gets absorbed into the mainstream, often turning it into a consumer product. While students might be exposed through various media to hip hop, including in studio dance spaces, dance teachers should not be engaging uncritically in approaches that further dilute its power.
Neither of these approaches honour the potential of dance in schools to support creative expression, critical thinking, and cultural understanding. The Ontario curriculum privileges creative movement which uses movement as the foundation for expression. In this approach, movement becomes a vocabulary that students can access to communicate meaning. Students develop aesthetic preferences and awareness through reflection on their own creations and exposure to a variety of models. Students engage with artists as disruptors and recognize the systems of oppression that acted on those artists as the cultural contexts for art-making. It invites them to consider which systems of oppression they want to act upon as disruptors, too.
This approach is the most effective at honoring student voice and choice, meeting students where they are at regardless of exposure to technical instruction outside of school, and giving time and space for meaningful reflection as part of their creative process.
It is also better suited to cross-curricular learning experiences – the creative process and critical analysis process that underpin every arts curriculum in Ontario – align with design-thinking processes, inquiry processes, and the writing process.
Dance as a media text
As media teachers, which we all essentially are, we need to recognize that the method or media forms through which we teach are just as important as the content we teach. This is the convergence of teaching “through and about” media. Consider that the “medium is the message” (the form dictates the content, i.e. the limitations and affordances of the body dictate the range of possibilities for gesture and meaning).
When pedagogical practices related to dance are exclusively focused on copying moves from a YouTube video, what messages are being unintentionally conveyed? What does that say about the purpose of dance? What might it say about the purpose and effects of using a commercial representation of a culturally significant artform? If the medium’s commercial purposes and meanings are not acknowledged, there is a danger that the content can be commodified, stripping it, as was mentioned earlier, of its potentially rich cultural and socio-political expression.
Dance is also intricately tied with cultural significance. If we teach hip hop moves without understanding the history and legacy of the genre, we risk cultural appropriation. In schools, we worry about misrepresenting Indigenous cultures, but the same respect should be accorded to other groups. Critical questions might be asked: “When non-Indigenous dancers improvise with traditional Indigenous dance moves, are they guilty of appropriation?” On the other hand, what of Indigenous Canadian hip hop groups? Are they, too, guilty of appropriation? Or is hip hop for the world? These might be interesting questions for classroom exploration. Consider the following examples:
- Back in 2024, the Olympics debuted breakdancing as a sport, and an Australian, Rachael Gunn (“B-girl Raygun”) delivered a performance that had spectators buzzing. Scientific American wrote a thoughtful analysis of the event. 2
- Kpop is known for its appropriation of hip hop culture. Inviting students to interrogate media like American Hustle Life, the reality TV show where BTS, the South Korean band, engage with some Los Angeles “hip hop tutors”, including Coolio, permits them to inquire through open-ended questions about representation and audiences.
These are good opportunities for cultural literacy, critical thinking, and responsible engagement.
Media and dance can intertwine within the dance-making, production process. For instance, CODE has a secondary unit exploring dance films. In their lesson (available on their website):
“Beginning with the exploration of dance film and how it differs from dance movies and live performance, students will have the opportunity to create a dance piece inspired by a literary source. In groups, students will create a storyboard, outlining how they would like to film their dance. Groups will then film and edit their dance piece, following the storyboard, to create their own dance film.”
AML would add that part of the production process could be a reflection log, or oral reflection on how they chose content, and then how they decided what to do with that content. Who would the piece be for? (Would that affect the creative choices? How?) What is/was their intended message and how effectively do they think their message was constructed? How did the [film-making] process affect/enrich their understanding of the topic?
Alternatives / Solutions
So, how can teachers design or provide lessons that are a more genuine fit to the Ontario curriculum and promote student autonomy and expression?
Judicious use of other media texts to use as prompts or inspirations, rather than as fully formed products to mimic without reflection, can be the way to go. Inquiry-based explorations of media texts about dance can offer insights into the production of dance-related media and support students’ critical thinking about the social, political, and historical contexts of dance production. Read a book and use the plot, characters, or themes to be a starting point for exploration. Current events can be an impetus for creation, evoking student perspectives as a starting point and engaging critically with texts to deepen their understanding of the events and the messages that they are communicating.
The Council of Dance and Drama Educators offers lesson plans and ideas, created not by Gen AI bots, but by experienced dance instructors who also understand child development, to support educators in engaging in creative and critical analysis processes and in anti-oppressive engagements with cultural dance forms.
The Association for Media Literacy provides questions that can be used to compare and contrast different dance experiences that fit well especially with strand A3: Exploring Forms and Cultural Contexts. For instance A3.1 is mostly the same for Grades 1-3; students are to “describe, with teacher guidance, a variety of dances from different communities around the world that they have seen in the media, at live performances and social gatherings, or in the classroom”.
Questions for primary division students might include:
- Where did you see this dance?
- What were the dancers wearing?
- How did the dancers move?
- Who danced? Who did not dance?
- Why were they dancing?
- How important was rehearsing or practicing in this dance?
- How did the dancers learn the dance?
- Was the dance meant to have an audience? Who is the intended audience?
- How would seeing this dance be different if it was presented in a different way? (i.e. watched on a phone, watched in a movie theatre, watched live in the gym, watched live on a theatre stage)
Junior division students are expected to describe, with teacher guidance, how dance forms and styles:
– reflect people’s different social and political roles (Grade 4)
– reflect the beliefs and traditions (Grade 5)
– express aspects of cultural identity (Grade 6)
of varied and diverse communities, times, and places (including Indigenous peoples in the past and present)
Questions for junior division students might include commentary on technical aspects of the performance, such as:
- How did lighting, costumes, make-up, set impact the message of the performance?
- What did these choices symbolize?
- What did these choices reveal about the intention of media production?
- What impact did these elements have on the audience?
The intermediate division expectations tie in directly with the 8 Key Concepts of Media Literacy. For instance, read this specific expectation from the Grade 8 dance curriculum.
A3.1 describe how social, political, and economic factors influenced the emergence and development of a dance form or genre of their choice (e.g., factors: funding to artists, the commercialization of dance, support for dance programs in schools; genres/forms: modern dance in the early twentieth century, the waltz in nineteenth-century Europe)
if you examine the suggestions related to the Grade 8 learning goal, then you will notice that factors such as funding and commercialization links with Key Concept #4, “media have economic implications” and genres/forms links to Key Concepts #6, 7 & 8: “media communicate political and social messages”, “form and content are closely related in each medium” and “each medium has a unique aesthetic form”.
Imagining Possibilities
Many elementary teachers are experts at literacy instruction and assessment. Media Literacy and Dance encourage us to consider that there are many types of texts we can engage with, both digital and embodied. AML and CODE encourage teachers to put personal fears of inadequacy or unfamiliarity with dance aside by reframing dance as another kind of text to explore using literacy skills.
The key difference is the vocabulary, or what we call “the elements of dance” (i.e., space, time, energy, relationship, body).
The rest lines up neatly with:
- reading strategies (accessing prior knowledge about the topic or creator, looking for repetition to identify patterns/motifs and symbols and themes, recognizing key vocabulary – the elements, making connections to self, to other texts, to the world, comparing and contrasting texts about the same topic, etc.);
- creative writing (generating ideas, exploring & experimenting, planning & focusing, drafting/producing preliminary works, seeking feedback, revising and refining, sharing);
- social studies (understanding historical, political, and social contexts, inquiry processes, the concepts of social studies thinking – especially perspective and trends); and
- media literacy (audience, purpose, form, producing media texts).
In this way, dance is a powerful tool for learning. Teachers teach not just about dance, but with dance. How you use the medium (dance) affects what is learned (medium is the message). Dance provides embodied ways of engaging with knowledge and the world around us.
This is not to mention the ways that dance can be used as a teaching method for things like coding (dance notation & choreography), math (visual-spatial reasoning, patterning, fractions, time), and science (life and water cycles, states of matter & molecule behaviour, ecosystems, etc.). Teachers may find that dance could be a unifying foundation for rich cross-curricular study. The limit is a teacher’s imagination.
So, let’s not limit ourselves from providing meaningful learning experiences for students in dance.
Endnotes
1 https://www.code.on.ca/history-code
Note: The image used with this article was designed by FreePik, permitted to use for free, and found at www.freepik.com (“flat design dance silhouette illustration”)
