by Menelaine Valencia
As educators and specialists, we take pride in the depth, complexity and relevance of the individual subjects we teach. We spend time in our planning to connect our curriculum to everyday life applications and to encourage students to build competencies that we believe are transferable between subject areas. Now, with the recent development of our new BC curriculum, we are also invited to cross-pollinate with other areas of study in order to increase student engagement and build bridges between their knowledge across the board.
As a relatively new dance specialist teacher in the Surrey district, I became curious about cross-curricular explorations through dance. While interdisciplinary collaborations between the arts (such as dance, music, drama, and visual art) felt quite natural to me, cross-curricular explorations into fields such as science, math, or French proved to be far less intuitive. I wanted to create a learning opportunity for my dance students to access their “academic” knowledge and use it as inspiration to create alternative dance pieces. How could I demonstrate to my students that they could use dance to enhance, mirror, and apply their learning in other subject areas?
To answer this question, I was initially inspired by the “Dance vs PowerPoint: A Modest Proposal” TED Talk presented by Professor John Bohannon. In his talk, Bohannon proposes that dance can articulate complex ideas far more accurately than PowerPoint presentations. Bohannon challenges his PhD students to communicate their research ideas through dance by hosting an annual dance contest for scholarship prizes. After watching his talk and reviewing some examples of “PhD dances”, I came to the realization that if dance can articulate something as complex as a science PhD dissertation, then certainly dance can articulate themes from any subject in the high school curriculum.
That year, I challenged my students to create dances that are inspired by any academic course of their choice. It was an open-ended inquiry project that I gave to my most advanced dance students. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of project proposals I received that year. I received proposals to create dances based off of books they were reading in English 12, dances that feature the stages of mental illness (Psychology 12), dances that highlight the struggles and issues due to the colonization and assimilation of our First Nations people (Socials 11), dances about homelessness and abuse (Social Justice 12), and dances that embody the graphic formulas studied in Pre-Calculus 12, to name a few. Some students created dance films with subtitles in collaboration with their Media 12 class. Other students created dances for stage—complete with props, lighting design, and supplementary projections with facts and quotes that relate to their theme. There were so many brilliant dance works that were produced that year that brought forward enlightening concepts and ideas. The project really took on a life of its own.
Since I started this project, I have found that it has pushed my students to create meaningful artwork and has challenged them to engage in their creative process in a new way. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the dances that are produced as it activated a whole new level of maturity in my students that I had never seen before. This project has proved to me, my students, and our audiences that dance is a powerful and sophisticated art form that deserves to stand both independently as well as collaboratively with the other subject areas.
This cross-curricular dance project grew from a simple choreography project explored with a small group of advanced dance students to a full-length evening show the year after. Now it has become a district-wide dance show that includes dance pieces submitted by secondary schools all over the city of Surrey. The show is called the Big Ideas Dance Showcase (inspired by the Big Ideas in our new curriculum). It presents dance works that communicate and educate both the performers and the audiences, dance works that transcend entertainment, dance works that engage both the intellectual prowess and embodied knowledge of students, dance works that create an impact.
This show started with a curious teacher and a simple idea: what happens if dance mixes with Math, Science, English or Media Arts? My hope is that through these dance works, students, teachers, family members, and friends are able to make connections between their knowledge of all subject areas. They all inspire, inform and enforce each other. This show is a reminder that we and our students are well-versed and well-rounded learners.
This year’s Big Ideas Dance Showcase will be hosted at Ecole Salish Secondary at 6:00PM on January 24, 2019. All proceeds of the show will be donated to a local charity. For more information and for video examples of past Big Ideas Project, please visit our website.
Surrey English Teachers' Association 