![]() ![]() Express: Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning.ĥ. Envision: Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed and imagine possible next steps in making a piece.Ĥ. Engage & Persist: Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus conducive to working and persevering at tasks.ģ. Develop Craft: Learning to use tools, materials, artistic conventions and learning to care for tools, materials, and space.Ģ. (Studio Habits of Mind from Studio Thinking, Hetland, Winner, et al, Teachers College Press, 2007)ġ. When my students allow themselves to start to explore, envision, and reflect, their choreography becomes more fully developed and their ideas expand into new depths.īelow is a list of 8 studio habits of the mind which I present and discuss with my students when teaching this approach. It can also facilitate the development of students’ abilities to become inventors in all areas of life. I now teach my students that studio thinking is a kind of attitude and perspective of how to develop and create works of art. Instead trying to “get it right” they should be trying to “create as many ways as possible to do it.” They should be thinking differently when they enter the dance studio. I have found that this mindset and approach is something I need to teach my students right from the start. When students go from class to class trying to get the right answer, to get the good grade, to get into the good college, they develop the inability to approach learning material in a creative manner. While studio thinking is my frame of mind when approaching teaching dance in my class, it is not the state of mind for my students. I have started to discuss the studio thinking approach with my students in order to help them enter a fresh mindset of expectations. This is when I stopped them and said “Now you need to explore, play, edit, and layer your movements with variety.” I told them week two needs to be about exploration and discussed what it meant to be in the process of dance making. ![]() After one week of working in groups (they have three weeks to get this done) almost every group had close to two minutes of choreography done and they looked around at each other like “Wow we are almost done!” I recently assigned a small group choreography project to my students and while the rubric requires the use of various choreographic elements, it also said it had to be two minutes long. I try to create rubrics that are more open to interpretation however I find that if I do not give some specific instructions/structure then the students get confused. I feel like a broken record sometimes when I say “explore, play, try it one way and then try it five more different ways to make sure you discovered what you feel to be the strongest way to dance it.” Placing greater emphasis on process verses product is something that I am constantly reinforcing with my students and the assignments given to them. No matter how much we practice exploration and play as a class, when it comes time for small group choreography projects, it always seems that my students are so eager to get to the product that they pass by the process in the blink of an eye. We discuss the elements of space, time, and energy, and how they facilitate the creation of climactic moments and communication within movement. We work on movement invention and manipulation, creating phrases, and finding form in movement. Throughout the school year I teach my students how to choreograph dances as works of art. Jessica Wilson, Assistant Editor – Dance. ![]() Emma Love Suddarth, Contributor - Dance.Lucy Vurusic Riner, Contributor – Dance.Janet Rothwell (Neidhardt), Contributor - Dance.Luis Eduardo Gonzalez, Contributor - Dance. ![]()
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