Children love to be able to dance, many start moving to music before they can even talk! Dance is something that should be incorporated into every classroom. As discussed in the book The Art of Dance in Education, "Just as children need to learn how to write stories and poems, how to create music and how to paint pictures, they also need to learn how to create, perform and appreciate dances" (Smith-Autard, 46). In addition to dance being something that children should learn to appreciate, both physical activity and the arts will lead to a student doing better in school - dance combines these two. As illustrated in the image above, teachers can incorporate dance into many different lessons in many different ways. Examples of these will be discussed on the Process page of this webquest.
There are areas where dance is a part of schools in a big way. For example, Smith-Autard discusses how in Britain, dance is a standard of primary education. The most advocated model until recent years that was considered the best fitting model in primary dance education was the Laban model. In recent years the schools have not used as much of a technique and it has been more about the students expressing themselves creatively. However, there are also many schools where they feel it is important to incorporate folk dances from Britain and teach the set dances to their students. Dance is commonly interrelated with other subjects in theme-based teaching.
In many schools the arts have been or are at risk to be cut. This is a huge disadvantage for the students. Young people who participate in some form of the arts for at least three hours, three days a week for a year are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement, three times more likely to be elected to class office within their schools, four times more likely to participate in a math and science fair, three times more likely to win an award for school attendance, four times more likely to win an award for writing an essay or poem, read for pleasure nearly twice as often, and perform community service more than four times as often (Americans for the Arts). David Lang is a teacher at William Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois and feels very passionate about his work. He said, "From a purely academic standpoint, studies have shown that students involved in the "arts" get higher scores on aptitude exams. It has to do with brain function and how the arts stimulate those parts of the brain involved in reading/math, etc. Also, the arts have existed since the dawn of man and will never go away; they are an important part of life and must be a part of our schools. The creative part of studying the arts cannot be duplicated in other subject matter" (David Lang, Personal Communication, November 13, 2008). When Rachel Bomba, a student at Elmhurst University, was asked about how she felt about arts being cut out of schools in order to make room for more academic classes she said that it was a horrible idea because being able to express herself was her only motivation for going to school many times, and if she had attended she would have been extremely unhappy. She needed to be able to express herself during the school day (Rachel Bomba, Personal Communication, November 11, 2010). While there are some children who are able to participate in after school arts programs, there are many who either cannot afford it or don’t know the joy that it can bring them. The fine arts are something that we as people need in our lives. The arts allow children to remain individuals in a world where everything is becoming standardized (Esquith, Rafe). The arts, and especially dance, are not at all considered in the same league as sciences or math and can be cut without much discussion (Fowler, Charles). This is why it is vital to incorporate dance into your classroom. You may not be able to save dance from being cut as a program, but you can use it within your lessons to help your students in more ways then you can imagine.
*The National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) was able to receive funding in 2001 for a three-year project from the U.S. Department of Education to identify and document dance education research. Results of this can be found in the publication Research Priorities for Dance Education: A Report to the Nation which was published in 2004 by NDEO.
