HOW DO STUDENTS LEARN THROUGH DANCE?
We had a
very different beginning p of our second dance workshop this week. Instead of
Iris planning warm up activities as usual, two students in pair taught the
class with some choreographed exercises. The idea of giving persevered teachers
opportunity and hence gaining confidence through practising teaching was very
good, since students could share and discuss their understandings of dance
concepts with the whole class.
The aspects about students' cognitive learning through dance
The focus
of this week’s dance workshop was cognitive learning, in the main section of
this week’s workshop, students were divided into groups. Each group were
provided a theme from the list of choreographic process and then students
needed to create sequenced performance using symbols or gesture provided and
reflect the idea of theme. The Arts in
the New Zealand Curriculum identifies education is dance is ’fundamental
to the education of all students’ and ‘dance is a significant way of knowing
with a significant body of knowledge to be experienced, investigated, valued
and shared’ (Gibson, R. & Ewing R., p.36). The topic of our group presentation was
environment, thus we combined the symbols of various kinds of weather in group performance.
During the process of ‘experiencing’ and ‘investigating’, we ‘valued’ and ‘shared’
ideas of cognitive learning, as well as developing our critical and logical
thinking skills. We also notised that in this lesson dance was established a strong connection to students' experiences, it was easier for them to understand the concepts and elements of dance and hence make better reflections on their learning through dance. Students could also understand what they were learning and how they could learn more effective and get more engaged.
Choreographic Process/ Recipe
Relative images of Environment, which were weather.
This is the Video of our group's sequence presentation."Environment and Weather".
Gibson, R.
& Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the arts.
Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan.
