Dance & Social Studies

 

Week 4

    Overall, this week's dance lesson focused on implementing movement and social studies to strengthen our understanding of integrating both subjects. Our instructor allowed us to interact with the material while ensuring that we were doing it accordingly to understand movement within the social studies curriculum.  In my previous posts, I have reflected on the lesson as a whole, but I would like to change it for this post.  As a future educator, I must understand the different focuses that each curriculum offers elementary students to connect multiple dance aspects. Our instructor provided us with other concepts and strategies (flocking, mirroring, call and response, sequence tableaux, etc.) that could be used with different social studies curriculum topics. 

    Looking back on the lesson, one aspect stood out to me the most from the entire lesson. As we approached the end of the lesson, our instructor demonstrated how Dance and Social Studies can be integrated into each other. She provided each of our groups with a choice revolving around a concept within the social studies curriculum. My group pick residential schools, and to me, the requirements of her task, we had to analyze sections of a picture book and then come up with words the represented the images. After we generated our terms, we need to use the creative process to combine movements to express our selected words. By far, this was the most challenging part because we had to think outside of the box, and knowing the Dance curriculum this far, I knew that the movement piece would become abstract. 

    By going through this process, I experienced the students' perspective when integrating these two curricula. As a future educator, I must understand the other side of the learning experience to ensure that my teaching is accurately grasping the students' motivation to contribute to the learning environment. This experience made me realize how incorporating movement into learning activities can remove traditional learning environments' ideology. Through this lesson, I made a virtual connection that movement pieces tell a story and, in a way, substitute for making the students write a response. It allows students to discuss "heavy" topics that ease the tension through interpretive movements. Overall, I gained a lot of knowledge on incorporating Social Studies and Dance to create a cross-curricular learning environment for my future students.