A Nonverbal Language for Imagining and Learning

Engender visions of alternative possibilities in culture and the environment through arts.

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-learning through the body-

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'Key Concepts of Dance

Many people relegate dance to the realms of play, physical exercise, recreation, and theater performance. Dance may be a vehicle, or an open channel, for purposeful communication. Emotion, a significant source of human motivation, constrains, or inspires people as they create dances and relate to one

another. There is the sight of dancers moving in time and space; the sound of physical movement, breathing, accompanying music and talk; the smell of dancers’ physical exertion; the tactile sensation of body parts touching the ground, other body parts, people or props, and the air around the dancers.

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Research on different forms of dance has revealed complex ways of conveying meaning in dance (through devices and spheres) that students can use according to their intellectual development and teacher instruction.

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Nonverbal communication constitutes a central feature of human development, knowing, and learning. Both dance and verbal language have the vocabulary (locomotion and gestures in dance) and grammar (rules in different languages and dance traditions for putting the vocabulary together and, in dance traditions, justifying how one movement can follow another). And both dance and verbal language have semantics (meaning).

Awareness of the cognitive potential of dance education in the

schools may make it welcome to many former skeptics.

Understanding the complexity and salience of dance as nonverbal

communication may provide depth to teachers’ explanations

as they ask students to create, perform, view, critique and analyze

dance and its place in culture and history. Of course, challenges

to traditional thinking in the discipline of dance itself, as

with any field, create resistance.

In dance education at its finest, students experience the cognitive, affective, and bodily transcendence of dance and its reverberation in their other academic and life experiences.'