Eeva Anttila & Suvi Honkanen

Embodying Hope through Dance

In this presentation, we explore hope as an embodied phenomenon and illuminate how hope may be embodied, ignited and sustained through dance. We focus on hope from the perspective of sensing, of the living body, and view hope as action and affect. Affects are energies that move across human and non-human bodies, animating shared spaces. From this perspective, hope takes place in the present moment, without the need to focus on future outcomes, benefits and aims. This way, it is possible to sense meaningfulness here and now. Seeing hope as affect and action challenges the psychological view of hope as a form of human motivation connected to a desired outcome or future goal.

Understanding dance education as pedagogy of hope seems important in developing the field during these challenging times. Pedagogy of hope connects the mind and the body. It is grounded in practice and involves action. Instead of “instilling” hope in learners, it aims to evoke hope and give it guidance. Hope as action and affect defies gravity and makes it possible to sense lightness, connectedness and an animated sense of life. Dance education also has great potential in re-imagining processes related to constructing identities. Acknowledging that young people’s identities are fluid and evolve through non-binary modes allows for bending norms. Through exploring boundaries in a safe environment, young people can find new forms of embodied expressions. To illuminate these themes, our presentation also includes artistic elements. These elements shed light on the conference themes of improvisation, imagination, identity and intelligence, both from embodied and scholarly perspectives.

During these times of crises, it is important to appreciate the significance of art in igniting and sustaining hope in children. Experiencing meaningful moments here and now may ignite hope even when the future is uncertain, as it is for many children. We, dance educators and artists, also need to be animated and mobilised by hope in order to counter disengaging and immobilising forces in society. Through this, we can see that dance can be an act of love and hope.

Susan Griss

Minds in Motion: Creative Movement as a Language for Learning

Because dancing is deeply encoded in human beings, young children have easy access to this form of creative expression. As teachers, we can take advantage of that, for – as John Dewey revealed – the more a child is actively involved in a learning activity, the greater the learning. That is why teaching subjects as diverse as language arts, math, history, and science through creative movement is so successful. Children can explore the diverse content of the curriculum through their own spontaneous movements, not only revealing the essence of a lesson, but also aspects of their own identity, skills, and intelligences that may be hidden to their teachers, their peers, and even to themselves. And because creative movement improvisation demands active participation and constant decision-making, students stay engaged.

Teaching through movement can help with the clarification and retention of ideas and information fostering intellectual growth while supporting a safe and inclusive environment conducive to differentiated instruction. Through the interdisciplinary approach of arts-integration, it can provide a visceral understanding of abstractions that children might otherwise not grasp.

There is an ancient Chinese saying: I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. This is the foundation of kinesthetic teaching. By allowing students to embody the curriculum, we are acknowledging and respecting a huge part of themselves: their physical beings. This in turn nurtures their self-confidence as they take responsibility in the proactive role of learning through their bodies. As one fourth grade teacher described: “It was like putting fish back in water!” And now we know through research on learning and the brain, that movement fully supports the way children learn.

For example, students can be immersed in the nuances of a story through creative movement to better comprehend a character, theme, or meaning of a text. Punctuation can be transformed beyond insignificant dots and squiggles into whole body movements that reflect the subtle meanings, design, and proper placement of punctuation marks. Children can experience the magic of multiplication as they watch 5 children perform 3 skips simultaneously, showing 5 X 3 skips in the blink of an eye. And they can grasp the realization that sound travels fastest through solid as they reenact a relay race of sound waves traveling through gas, liquid, and solid.

And these learnings are not superficial. Hundreds of teachers have reported that their students gain a deeper understanding and retention of these and many other lessons using movement strategies. When learning is embedded in movement, learning becomes visible. And it truly awakens children to the joy of learning! 

Robi Krofič

First-Person Artistic Experience in Contemporary Pedagogical Approaches

Education through art emerged in the European context closely tied to the rise of aesthetics (Kant, Schiller) and the Enlightenment-Romantic concept of forming the Kantian subject and aesthetic taste (Kant, Schiller, Lichtwark). Phenomenology deepens the exploration of the original ancient meaning of poiesis and openness to sensory perception (aesthesis), as well as a new way of justifying the existential significance of art in education. While Enlightenment aesthetics primarily studied the artwork as a medium of specific languages, phenomenology focuses on analysing the artistic event as a dialogue between the artist, the artistic object and the art recipient, attributing crucial value to the first-person experience of both the creator and the recipient of the artwork. Gadamer defines the uniqueness of the artistic event by the playful nature of artistic representation, which is committed solely to the internal reasons of the activity itself, while also attributing to it exceptional educational power, as it determines both the manner of creating the artwork and the active response of the recipient, and thus their involvement in the dialogical play of the artistic event. The natural prototype of such a dialogical play of the artistic event is the child’s symbolic play as one of the first mediums of learning.

The significance of first-person artistic experience, emphasised particularly by poetic pedagogy (Homan), aligns with the ideas of the contemporary educational-theoretical approaches of dialogical pedagogy (Sidorkin, Matusov), relational pedagogy (Bingham, Sidorkin), pedagogy of listening (Rinaldi) and communicative autopoetic pedagogy (Luhman, Medveš), as well as the comprehensive inductive educational approach (Kroflič). Analysis of first-person artistic experience highlights the crucial role of imagination, improvisation and personal bodily engagement in the artistic event, strengthening the embodied intelligence of the participants and ensuring an inclusive environment for both artists and audience, which is characteristic of all performative arts, especially dance.

Theoretical research on the pedagogical significance of first-hand artistic experiences, as well as analysis of the introduction of arts education across the entire school vertical, indicate that dialogue with art, attentive to the experience of the educated individual, is a very rich pedagogical tool with which we should complement predominantly scientifically and technologically oriented public education. As demonstrated by the results of selected projects and UNESCO recommendations, this goal is best achieved through the interdisciplinary collaboration of kindergartens and schools with artists and cultural-artistic institutions, assuming that we recognise the child/adolescent as being (Malaguzzi) capable of expression through artistic languages.

Maja Delak & Rok Vevar

Dance Education between Personalities and Practices

In the field of contemporary dance, approaches to teaching dance have changed within educational models according to needs, but teaching methods have always been fundamentally conditioned and limited by the way in which pedagogues percieve the success of the educational process. As well as generating kinetic competences, models of dance education have given rise to modes of the human behaviour, openness to artistic practices and forms of social responsiveness (feeling for the (dance) community) of those following various educational programmes. Not least, educational programmes have always generated opportunities for artistic creativity, which, in a variety of ways and within different dance paradigms, have generated the art of dance as well as its public life. In the region of today’s Slovenia, different approaches to dance education have emerged over time, and competence in the field of dance has meant different things.

In their presentation, Rok Vevar and Maja Delak will draw on a corpus of examples to create a composition of selected concepts, a network of examples and stories that bear witness to various approaches to education, the needs of the art of dance, and the temporal and spatial environments in which dance enters into communication with its audiences. They will focus on where and how dance teaching has crossed the boundaries between learning the private, individual dance styles that are typical of the modern era, and providing kinetic and creative tools from which students and dance artists can shape diverse examples of their creative will. They will also examine how the need for dance education has changed according to the public experience of dance art.

Illustrated by photographic and written materials, their presentation will not be structured chronologically, but according to specific issues.