Why Should I Teach Folk Dancing?
Missy Strong Mount Laurel Township Schools strongfamily6 @ gmail. com
When you are an elementary and middle school general music teacher, there is a lot to do. You often feel, and rightly so, that there isn’ t enough time in the day( week, month, year?) to get it all done. Between district curricular mandates, performances, assemblies, and everything else you have to do, why add one more component to an already over-crowded plate?
I would like to make a case for why you should consider adding folk dance to your program. While there are many districts in which we find our Physical Education colleagues charged with the dance component of the elementary curriculum, I believe movement, and more specifically folk dancing, belongs under the auspices of the music teacher. Let me make my case:
Folk dancing in the elementary and middle school classroom allows our students to demonstrate their growing beat competence. When folk dancing our students can exhibit what we’ ve been teaching them about moving to beat. While doing this, they are also experiencing their own growing musicality in an authentic music-making situation. They are able to understand form in music better through movement while experiencing an authentic community music-making activity, which means they can articulate what form in music is more effectively. Additionally, when we lead folk dance instruction, we are helping students get what is so often lacking in our culture: opportunities for positive peer interaction. These interactions help our students build etiquette skills while also creating a positive community with their peers. But the overarching thing that a student who is folk dancing in a music classroom experiences is … fun!!
Before embarking on formalized folk
dance instruction, it is important to assess where your students are musically. Are they comfortably and confidently feeling both the big and small beats in music and reflecting that understanding in their movements? Can they sing in tune with healthy and beautiful sound production? Lastly, are they beginning to connect with the expressive piece of music- the magical and inexpressible feelings that lay beneath the surface?
Do you know how to gauge how much challenge your students need without giving them too much in order for them to feel successful? Have you given them multiple movement experiences beforehand in their early years? Do they understand how“ ready counts”( students do not begin moving until you’ ve established the steady beat) function? Are they prepared to be respectful partners and participants?( more on this later.) If the answers to these questions are“ yes”, then your students are musical and are ready to start dancing.
Choosing The Right Dance
When looking at how to get your students moving, choose a folk dance that is developmentally appropriate. It is imperative that you, yourself, know the music and the steps beforehand. Make sure you go through the dance ahead of time to find things that are going to be a challenge for your students. Think through what new vocabulary and musical elements you want to highlight and how you will present those during instruction. Create clear, simple instructions that are easy for them to follow as they move. Mixers, circle of partners, or longways set dances( where partners are in two straight lines facing each other), are a great place to start your folkdance instruction.
A Word About Partners And Respect.
Many people are convinced that their students will not like dancing and that this will manifest in a bad attitude, or that their students will just laugh it off and never take it seriously. In a perfect world you teach your students from their early years so that you can instill in them the fact that, not only are they to be courteous, respectful, and encouraging to their classmates, but that moving and dancing is simply something you always do in music class.
But perhaps you want to start it with your older kids, or you want to try dancing after having tried and failed previously. The answer will sound overly simple- you must communicate to students that they are going to dance. It might be a bit uncomfortable at first, but they will get used to it and will grow to really enjoy dancing.
I am a FIRM believer that elementary students, without always being aware of it themselves, want to be kids. They want to sing and dance, and play, and be young. They were made to be musical, and are at an age where it should be fun to do so. I tell my students that the Music Room is a safe place to be a kid. I don’ t tolerate anyone acting like they are too grown up for something that I, a middle aged old lady, can do and enjoy. Oddly enough, if all students in the class feel like they are being“ made” to dance with a good attitude by the teacher, it actually frees them from the normal constraints of having to act cool so that they can just be a kid and have fun..
I employ a two-part approach to dancing etiquette:( 1) we will all respect, encourage, and be courteous to each other, and( 2) if you have issues with the person who is your temporary partner, and you very well may outside of this room, you will not give evidence of that in your demeanor toward
TEMPO 22 OCTOBER 2016