This book provides a hands-on dance teaching method for teachers in pre-school and elementary school, inclusive education and after-school extra curriculum activity, with or without earlier experience of teaching dance, who want to imply dance in their everyday pedagogical work. Numerous exercises and lesson outlines are described to [ omit: explore and] teach creative dance, and dance integrated in the teaching of English, mathematics and natural sciences. The carefully designed dance method applied is firmly anchored in contemporary educational theory and dance educational practice, as described in the book’s initial chapter, underscoring why working in an art mode like dance highly matters to education. The theoretical framework is informed by educational theorist Gert Biesta's ideas on letting art teach, subject-ness and democracy, progressive educationalist John Dewey's thinking on art as experience, democracy and education, and dance educator and scholar Susan Stinson’s stances on kinesthetic experience and dancing as becoming.
With its abundance of examples and its overall celebration of dance and the work of the senses, this work constitutes both a powerful argument and a rich tool to create space in young people’s education for dance and (kin)esthetics as specific and indispensable sources of expertise and [ replace:] modes of dialogue with the social and natural world. Dancing and discovering the magical world of movement, children and students open their senses to a world of insight, meaning and knowledge – letting dance teach.
Part I Teaching Dance: A Theory.- Ontology and Epistemology.- Part II
Teaching Dance : A Method.- The nature and elements of dance.- Dancing with
each other.- Part III Letting Dance Teach Language, Mathematics and Natural
sciences.- Dancing Through the Alphabet.- Dancing Through the Alphabet.-
Dancing Natural Sciences.- Summary Letting dance teach : a plea for aesthetic
teaching.
Paul Moerman is a dancer, an actor and a literary translator, educated at Stockholm University of the Arts and Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is a teacher educator at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden and a doctoral candidate in Arts Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Formerly a civil engineer and an architect educated at Ghent University, Belgium and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, he has worked as an architect in Belgium, Sweden and the USA. Along with his artistic work on stage and film, he has pursued a teaching career in dance, drama and creative writing, as artistic expressions in their own right, and integrated these in the teaching of language, math, science and philosophy. He has been teaching for thirty years in preschool, elementary and secondary school, inclusive education and after-school activities, and at teacher educations at universities in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and Australia. He has designed a teaching and learning methodology drawing on dance, featuring the programs Dancing through the Alphabet, Dancing Math, Dancing Natural Sciences and Dancing with Each Other. He has published and presented his research on dance in/as education world-wide. Modelled on his practice of dance teaching/letting dance teach, he formulates a concept of esthetic teaching, advocating an esthetic turn in education.
