Problematizing Curricula
Drawing for Socialists
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mike Mosher
Drawing for Socialists defends the act of drawing in 2018 as a potential act of social liberation, via personal empowerment. Through drawing, an artist seizes a moment of experience in the world, a person, place or object in a unique balance of objectivity and subjectivity. Its gestalt communication can then further progressive collective action. The talk will examine public barriers to drawing. Beginning students are often frozen with perfectionism. Yet there is the 800-pound gorilla of photography, and its impact (depicting capitalist commodities, inspiring statist sentimentalities) upon a century-and-a-half of representation. I offer a classroom-tested step-by-step Beginning Drawing semester syllabus, each exercise building new skills upon its predecessor (at its end, the gorilla is addressed). This is followed with an Intermediate/Advanced program to broaden skills and perception. Drawing also nourishes the critical, sometimes collective media of the comics, of community murals, and even fine-art installations.
Choreographer as Teacher, Teacher as Choreographer: Identity and Practice in the Postsecondary Setting
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rebecca Gose
College level dance students commonly participate in faculty (or guest-led) choreographic processes and their culminating performances. As an applied and often required learning experience, it is thought to develop the essential skills needed as performers, choreographers and teachers. Pedagogically, however, many gaps exist in understanding and defining what is being taught and learned in this unique setting. Recent relevant literature problematizes the roles of and relationships between choreographer and student in this choreographic process (Butterworth, 2004), the effect of student perceptions about learning and rehearsal (Haines & Torres, 2016), as well as the ethic of care between the teacher-as-choreographer and the student (Gose & Siemietkowski, in press). Using these investigations as a starting point towards further understanding, this paper will overview a phenomenological investigation into the perceptions, experiences, beliefs, and objectives of teachers-as-choreographers in a postsecondary setting. Lines of inquiry include: What are the primary instructional practices used in this unique choreographic setting? What kinds of pedagogical thinking is a choreographer employing? What are the teacher-as-choreographer’s implicit perceptions or beliefs that help shape this process? How might choreographic and pedagogical goals intersect, collide, or coincide?
Rudolf Laban's Diagonal Scale as a Foundation for Creative Movement Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Whitney Moncrief
While leading various movement classes in schools across the Midwest, I have found an overall consistency in a lack of spatial awareness as well as an inability to explore creative ways to construct movement. I have recently been exploring a practical approach to create an accessible way for students to incorporate and explore various developmental movement practices. The development of implementing Rudolf Laban’s Diagonal Scale into the teaching approach by two elementary school teachers over the last year has provided a foundation for building language, spatial awareness, effort modulation, and space harmony for these students. Just as Anne Green Gilbert’s Brain Dance is used for cognitive balance and allows students to be more expressive and articulate in movement, Laban’s Diagonal Scale can provide a blueprint for dance choreography, as well as a steppingstone in finding personal movement preferences and vocabulary. This paper provides examples of creative ways to implement Laban’s Diagonal Scale into movement games in elementary school classrooms. By using the Diagonal Scale as a blueprint for creative movement games, will the students become more spatially aware? Will students use the scale as a skeleton for creating movement sequences? Will Laban’s Diagonal Scale provide a better sense of self expression and confidence?
