The Importance of Dance Education in Relation to the Need for Connection in a Post-Crisis World
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/28169344.155Keywords:
Wordlessness, dance, education, connectionAbstract
Dance is the physical expression of what our lives look like – they include a combination of steps, a rhythm of patterns, connections with people and a series of emotions. As educators, we are teaching students how to navigate adolescence and, by extension, how to live in the world. Dancer and religious scholar, Kimerer LaMothe stresses that there “is a dancer in each of us and a dance in everything we do” (LaMothe, 2015, p. 15). There is a crisis in dance education, as evidenced by the diminishing importance of programs in public education systems. This issue is not new, as Shirley Hoad posits how dance in provinces across Canada had been pushed aside and/or lumped together with physical education courses (Hoad, p. 46; 1990). Ann Dils (2007) reflected on a similar issue, questioning why dance was absent from schooling when there was significant evidence that children were better able to express themselves through movement than through traditional literacy instruction (Dils, 2007). Focusing on Hannah Arendt’s (1958a) theory of ‘worldlessness’, tells a cautionary tale of the potential dangers a loss of dance education would bring. This paper will conclude with Maxine Greene’s (1995) Releasing the Imagination and Arendt’s The Crisis in Education (1958b) to pose hope for the future of dance.
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