Week 2 Dance 1

HOW CAN WE, AS TEAHERS, USE DANCE TO ENGAGE STUDENTS?

Our first dance workshop started last Friday. The structure and activities we did in the class was similar to the dance lesson we had last year, but the focus this year is about how can we as teachers in the future to connect dance to students and thus engage them to learn.

 The elements of dance, missed the term 'dynamics'.

The term ‘creative‘ is “intelligible in a variety of seemingly different artistic activities (e.g. making, performing, appreciating)’ provided that we realize that there is no essential meaning governing it use”(HeyForn,V.M.,1985). To engage students and develop their abilities including creativity, Iris introduced three types of learning to us: physical, social and aesthetic learning. Physical learning develops individual’s physical skills through ‘making’ and ‘performing’, the activities could be the isolation warm-up or a sequence of choreography we did in the workshop. Social learning relies on students’ communication and collaboration, like doing a group ‘presentation’ in class. Aesthetic Learning requires students to discriminate, give reflection and appreciation to other groups’ choreographed sequences.

These are the five types of movement we involved in the workshop for warm-up activity,improvisation,development and reflection.

This is the photos of our group's sequence presentation. (Miyu,Tahmina and myself )

I really appreciate and enjoyed watching all group presentations we did in the last workshop. Like the PDHPE most of us did on Thursday, dance is similar as they both develop students’ physical learning. However, it is different that dance as one resource to support in teaching other subjects, helps students to learn more effectively and improve their creativity and learning in social and aesthetic area. To either PDHPE or dance, making the class FUN is one of the most effective methods to engage students in class.

Reference:

Heyforn, V.M. (1985). The Artistic Creativity in The Aesthetic in Education, Malcolm Ross (Ed.)Pergamon

Week 1 Introduction Lecture

WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS?

This question was given at the beginning of our only lecture this semester. The teacher introduced a book written by John Carey, What Good Are The Arts?. The question seemed to be simple, but we found it was actually difficult since the definition and benefits of the arts were too board to be concluded into one sentence. We were then set a task to present our own ideas of the arts in groups rather than plain discussion. The form of presentation was not limited, thus it could be a song, a poem or any other creative arts forms.

Our group made a piece of drawing of a heart shape. The “heart” could be formed by a group of people or an individual.  The benefits of the arts we want to express thru this picture are:

• The arts allow self-expression, but also encourage collaboration;
• The arts can help people to communicate in other ways rather than just talking;
• The arts do not impose any limitation on both people and forms of presentation;
• The arts can also develop children's imagination and interests.

 

As an audience of other groups' presentation, I noticed that the majority of them connect their works with literature, such as poems. Those groups used many symbolic language and rhyme to make the poems meaningful and fun. Their vocal and facial expression was also effective to help the audience to understand their ideas. The combination of the arts and literature could motivate the class to achieve better results; furthermore, it would improve students’ learning skills and imagination as recommended in the KLAs.

Carey argued in pre-industrial societies that art was "spread through the whole community". Nowadays even in primary schools, people increasingly agree that learning the arts has many benefits that cannot be provided in other subjects like mathematics. I would like to ask this question in my future class and ask them to do the task as well, since during the process of thinking and discussing, students could benefit from the arts better.

Reference:
Morrison,B.2005 The Guardian. A lesson with the art master: Blake Morrison enjoys John Carey's inspiring look at our attitudes to culture, What Good Are the Arts?http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/11/highereducation.news

Welcome!

Hi, this is Krystal Ni. Welcome to my blog for EDUP2007 Creative Arts 2. I will make a new entry every week from now on to record my Creative Arts learning experience and pieces of treasure I found in this course. There will be an entry about my Week 1 Introduction Lecture and 12 entries classified into 4 categories: dance, music, visual arts and drama. These experiences will be very useful for primary teaching to motivate the class and develop students’ creativity.