Dance for Language, Language for Dance: Lesson Plan
Jane Spiro, UK
Jane Spiro runs teacher development, action research and creative methodology programmes for language teachers at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is also author of two resource books for creative teaching, a methodology coursebook, learner literature stories, a novel and two poetry collections. E-mail: jspiro@brookes.ac.uk and janerspiro@gmail.com
Menu
Why we were dancing: the background
How we danced: the lesson
What we felt when we danced
The join between language and the world of objects is inevitable, as soon as we begin to name and label what we see. Similarly, song and music are amongst ways we come to feel an intimacy with a language, appreciate rhyme and rhythm and commit lines to memory even before we understand them. The link between language and movement is a frequent feature of early childhood classrooms. Many children will remember the pleasure of dancing in a circle to a nursery rhyme such as Ring-a-ring-of-roses, or performing actions to words such as Simon Says. Yet, as we leave childhood, our educational experiences seem to retreat into the head and leave the body behind. We have pedagogies such as ‘total physical response’ but this is a long way from a joy in movement, least of all an exploration of movement as creative language.
This is why, when planning a symposium in May 2015 on Language and the Creative Arts, I felt it would be exciting to take the imaginative leap and invite a dance educator to work with us, as language teachers. This lesson plan describes what took place when Jean Clarke, dance educator at Oxford Brookes University, planned a dance class in a way that was explicitly mindful of the join between language and movement. We, her students, were language teachers both in TESOL and EAL, working with first language and second language learners, and in both state and private sectors. My account of the lesson is both as a participant, and as a teacher and teacher educator recognizing that, in all the many ways our profession connects language and the creative arts, dance is the missing link.
The first challenge was entering a room without furniture. This experience set up immediate feelings of exposure and unfamiliarity. We all clearly felt uneasy: did we sit on the floor – for many ‘of a certain age’ a challenge, either in the sitting or the getting up again; did we ‘hang about’ the centre of the room or take ourselves into the corners, using the walls to prop us up? If so, how long might we be expected to remain in one position – for the first minutes, or for a whole one hour session?
Jean, our dance-language teacher, encouraged us to see the space as an opportunity.
Exploring the space
- Explore the room by moving, walking, striding around it, and weave in and out between others in the room. Try out all the corners of the room, the middle and the sides. Notice if there are any parts of the room you are missing out.
- Notice how you are weaving/moving/changing your direction/reacting to the movements of others.
Linking movement and language
- After 5 minutes of exploring the room, gather around the whiteboard and brainstorm words to describe movements, and the shapes made by movements: sway, dip, swing, duck, flow, leap
- Choose one of the words and create movements to ‘show’ its meaning. Move around the room with your movement, and as you ‘meet’ others , mirror or respond to their movements with another of your own. In this way you are building up movement ‘conversations’ with one another.
Developing a language sequence
- With this ‘warm-up’ of movement/words, return to the list of words on the whiteboard. Now, select just one of the words and brainstorm where/who/when this movement might be seen: eg. wave – Mexican wave, waves of the sea, not waving but drowning
- Invite the class to form groups of 4 -6. Each group now selects a movement word and plans together all the associations with that movement; eg. fly: kite, bird, feather, aeroplane, petals; fly away in the wind;
Developing a movement sequence
- As a group, ‘translate’ these associations into movements, improvising and noticing the different responses and ‘translations’ amongst group members. Mirror and build on the movements of one another.
- Combine and blend the different movement-translations amongst the members, to create small ‘dances’.
Learning from others
- Invite half the class to watch the dances of the other half: then reverse dancers/observers.
- As closure, form a circle and invite each person round the circle to describe/explain/show one thing they had noticed/enjoyed about the dances of others. This could be a word, a phrase, or a movement mirroring something they had noticed.
Thus the lesson evolved as a blend between language brainstorming, translated into movement; with the movement growing from individual movements to longer sequences in an exact parallel with the building from words to whole sentences and longer sequences.
As a participant, I began by experiencing the empty space of the room as awkward and exposing, but given the guidance and trust in the facilitator, quickly saw it as an opportunity; to stride, move, and take ownership of the room. This was a new way of imagining the language class and gave movement the symbolism of self-confidence, mastery and initiative. I noticed my fellow participants too, relaxing into this as they became less self-conscious, more trusting of the process, and gradually totally absorbed. Conversing through movement was an interesting way to ‘meet’ and notice one another, mirroring one another’s movement as a way of building empathy and team feeling. The dance sequences were created with great seriousness and observed respectfully. All this seemed a long distance to have travelled from the opening moments where we seemed like gawky teenagers with no furniture to hide behind.
What was there for us to take away from this experience, as language teachers and teacher educators? Perhaps that spaces such as the outdoors, the school hall or gym, can be learning opportunities if used in principled and specific ways as places to be discovered; also that movement can be a starting place for learning. While it goes beyond language, movement/dance can also be a place where lexical associations, dialogue, sequencing and development of an idea can be expressed physically. We do not have to be especially talented, fit and lithe, athletic or experienced; the capacity to move mindfully and creatively belongs to us all and brings into the language classroom another part of the self often left outside the door, or left behind in childhood.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Multiple Intelligences course at Pilgrims website.
|
