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Teaching Statement

 

I believe education is about becoming comfortable with the search for meaning and understanding, and the ambiguity that is inherent in that search.  My dance training directly influences my orientation to curriculum and the role of the teacher and student in the classroom. Choreographers uniquely consider dancers’ abilities, technique, performance, environment and space, production, and audience to make dances that are expressive and meaningful to those experiencing them.  I perceive good teaching as good choreography.  When done well the choreography drops into the background so that steps and structure are unseen but are deeply felt by those experiencing it.  The dynamic learning that results is powerful and long lasting.  I work continually to raise my pedagogies to this choreographic level. Teaching and learning happen in the body.

 

 

I believe that good teachers are facilitators, who create experiences that can open new doors and pathways of thinking for the student.  Students, however, should be encouraged to take an active role in their own learning.  It is only through engagement with the experience of the curriculum that students find opportunities for connection to themselves and their previous knowledge.  Students are active agents, active thinkers and bring with them a palimpsest of experiences that interact with the curriculum.

 

 

I try to choreograph learning experiences that invite students to put themselves in relation to their socio-cultural environment. I think about this like the edges of a map where the unknown meets the known.  I ask students to move, to dance along the edges of their own maps of knowledge and experience and add to their map, creating new edges, exploring new landscapes and the movement created there. In a recent course Visual Methods in the Elementary Classroom, elementary pre-service educators with little art experience drew maps of places that were special to them as children. These maps invoked writing about stories, memories, smells, sights, sounds—sensual experiences of place—that then, with the maps, acted as a prompt for a multi-media bookmaking project.  This process allowed students to experience meaningful art making, apply growing media skills, reflect on their own experiences as children (and also on their assumptions about childhood which informs their growing pedagogy), and build an understanding that experiences can be trans-mediated from visual and verbal and back again.

 

 

By providing a combination of writing and making opportunities students can enter into new conversations with course materials in their own way and then move toward the experiences that are more unfamiliar.  Inviting students to reflect on who they are and where they come from before, during, and after they engage with course materials helps them each find their own connections.  The same commitment to visual methodologies that propels my research also inspires my teaching.  To conclude, whether in small classes or large I am dedicated to the ways arts education values and invoke students’ lived experiences. 

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