Dance and Movement Workshop

I attended the Dance and Movement Workshop on October 15, 2009 for 1.5 hours in the Greene Building at NYU. The sponsors of this event were Suzanne Carothers, Darrell Hucks, and Freddie Moore. I wanted to attend this workshop because I wanted to learn how to incorporate dance into my future classroom because I realize the importance of physical movement for kids. I knew that dance is a great channel for students to express themselves but I had no idea that there were actual dance standards that could be integrated into the curriculum!

We also learned how to validate and incorporate the students’ cultures through developing dances that allowed freestyle or dances from specific cultures. Freddie is an incredible dance professional who holds in-class workshops at different classrooms during the year. Through the help of a CD of neosoul Nursery Rhymes and Freddie’s effective strategies, we all contributed to the creation of a choreographed dance that represented a little bit of all of our personalities and cultural identities. This CD and dances can be used to understand the children’s backgrounds and also learn about who they are. I related this event to the Multicultural Case Study which encourages us to really get to know our children; I feel that dancing is a great route to achieve this.

Another valuable lesson I got from this lesson was over the many misconceptions teachers hold about their students while they are working or listening. My immediate response to a student who looks like they are restless or wandering is to think that the child is not listening or being a bad student. I learned, however, that children have various ways of listening and just because they are not sitting or listening how you want them to, it doesn’t mean that they are not learning!