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Faculty at Northwest Vista College have identified a number of principles of liberal arts education that apply to the community college curriculum----better known at NVC as ASK Outcomes.
Attitudes-
- Behave with integrity and practice personal and social responsibility.
“The body doesn’t lie”---Martha Graham, founder of modern dance
Dancers engage in the discipline of daily practice and are subject to the exacting standards of
physics and anatomy.
- Desire to grow and learn throughout your life
Learning to dance is a multi-faceted activity with the capacity to engage mind, body and spirit; cognitive ,affective and sensorimotor faculties. It is sufficiently complex to take more than a lifetime to master.
- Value diversity and differences in people
Choreographer Ana Halprin writes that “Anybody, no matter how old or young, in whatever physical condition, has a capacity to move, even if it is just your little finger or a movement carried as an image in your mind’s eye.”
The challenging nature of dance training requires each student to work within the idiosyncracies of her own body and realize the uniqueness each mind-body system.
- Accept change, nuance, and uncertainly
The dancer must create her body for each day, for each moment. She does this each times she takes class or prepares to dance.
Dance artist and master pedagogue Jan Erkert writes, “A constant process of doing and undoing is at the core of training. The smart dancer unhooks the wiring in order to build a broader set of choices.”
Our bodies are full of opposites and contradictions---right and left, up and down, push and pull, heavy and light, stillness and movement, sensations and intellect.
Dancers learn to encompass the paradox of the body, holding these dualities in dynamic tension. The dancer learns to elegantly negotiate the moving body’s constant state of flux. That is grace.
The dancer heightens our awareness of the fluctuating nature of our existence; a crucial understanding in an age of rapid technological and social change.
Skills-
- Use effective communication skills (visual, verbal, written and listening)
…And gestural!! ………Dance is the art of elaborated gestural communication.
- Use effective collaborative skills
Sharing time and space with others in dance is one of the best ways to build community.
- Thinking critically and creatively
The dance student harnesses cognitive knowledge and analytical skills to is creating new pathways for action in the body.
- Set goals and assessing your progress
The goals of dance training are multi-faceted and unique to the individual. This encourages the student to take an active roll in assessing her own progress.
Knowledge-
- Understand how truth is apprehended in the sciences, social sciences and humanities
Improvisational dancer Kent DeSpain suggests that dancing is ”…another way of thinking, but one that produces ideas impossible to achieve in stillness.”
Dance training is a kind of research in which truth or knowledge is pursued through the body in motion.
More than developing physical skills, dance training connects us with the embodied nature of experience. Dance isn’t just learning the steps!! Dancers work with states of awareness. In the tradition of existential research at the core of humanities philosophy and aesthetics, physical training creates a rich field of somatic experiences for enquiry.
Dance makes way for the body in a liberal arts education!!
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