Integrated Arts Week 10
This week in integrated arts we had a lecture based on dance and then a dance and drama workshop. The lecture was based on the importance and meaning of creative dance and it being taught. We talked about what your role is as a dance facilitator in a school class room and the main way to do so is to teach the ten basic dance skills that we learnt in the first week of dance, balance, turn, twist etc. Also as a dance teacher you have to facilitate a safe space for dance to take place, this means doing it in a large area with no trip or slip hazards. Also, to assist when required but to try and leave the children to use their own creativity to create a dance or series of moves that they can be proud of and know that they made themselves with only the base been laid down for them. I am currently training to become a qualified dance teacher outside of university as I already assist my dance teacher for four classes a week and take over the class if circumstances are made that I need to. Due to this I feel that teaching dance is one of my more confident areas of integrating the arts into education. Creative dance should be left up to the children to make their own vision of what it should look like. Dance should be made fun, meaningful, safe for the children to lead the learning (Cone, 2009). In the curriculum for excellence it is stated that children should have the opportunity to create, present, appreciate and evaluate dance (CFE, 2009). I hope to be able to do this in classes in the future.
This week’s drama workshop was where we presented our microteaching presentations. Our presentation focused on using “we’re going on a bear hunt” as a stimulus for the lesson. We focussed on using the role on the wall convention of looking at the thoughts of the family around the bear and then the bears feelings on the inside. I feel that our presentation went okay, we were planning on reading out the book to the class the same way you would with children but the member of our group who had the book forgot to bring it, so we had to improvise and find a YouTube video of the book being read. I also felt that we should have maybe done more than one drama convention in our lesson, but we decided to focus in depth on just one. We also got to watch and take part in all the other groups presentations/ lessons. I felt this was really good as it showed different ways you could relate different drama conventions to different story books and lesson plans.
This week’s dance input was mainly focused on us coming up with our warm ups that could be used with a class. Then we worked on remembering and putting together our dance, so it can be recorded next week. First of all, each group was given part of the warm up to make up, so our group came up with Christmas tig, which is similar to toilet tig but instead of a toilet you are a Christmas tree and instead of flushing the toilet you run around the tree putting the tinsel up. I think this was a good activity because we got to see lots of different warm up games and stretches to do. Then we went over our dances from the last dance input and changed the whole class dance from a Halloween one to a Christmas themed one and then put everyone’s bits together to make a whole class dance. This helped with thinking about a series of dance lessons come together to have a final product that a class can be proud of. I have attached a video of our groups dance bellow.
Overall, this week’s learning was based on learning how to teach these sections of the arts but at the same time furthering out development in the two sections. In both of the workshops we furthered our skills in presenting and dance. We also were learning how to teach these to children in a primary class. I think I will definitely use the method of teaching dance that we have been working through in the last weeks in my own class in the future. And I also think I would feel more confident in teaching a drama lesson now than what I was before we completed this module.
REFERENCES
- Cone (2011) Following Their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating DancesFile. Publisher: Routledge
- Education Scotland (2004) – Curriculum for Excellence; Experiences and Outcomes [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/scottish-education-system/policy-for-scottish-education/policy-drivers/cfe-(building-from-the-statement-appendix-incl-btc1-5)/Experiences%20and%20outcomes [Accessed: 19th November 2018]
