Standard 7: Integrating Community Resources to Support and Enhance Your Dance Program
Accomplished teachers coalesce community resources to build their dance program so it is central to community education, art, culture, society, and business. Genuine collaboration and networks create pathways to establishing, nurturing, and sustaining dance programs in a community.
This poster and the below videos are from an interdisciplinary research project I did during my undergraduate studies. This project required collaboration with food scientists, food science students, dance students, and students within the University Honors Program. It brought together people from different disciplines to use dance in a way that was beneficial to the community (creating informational outreach videos on food safety). My work on this project demonstrates my ability to collaborate with others and build bridges that connect to various resources within the community. It shows that I do not believe dance should be siloed, but should be integrated so that it both receives support from and gives back to the community. Just as I used this collaboration for my research project, I intend to use it in my classroom!
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These are real emails I have sent as invitations to my dance shows. In one, I am inviting two of my dance professors to see dance shows unrelated to the official dance program. In the other, I am inviting a food science professor to come to my senior dance showcase. In both cases, I was inviting people who were not involved in what was being shown, but with whom I wanted to share these dance events so they could understand their importance to my life. I intend to continue to invite seemingly unrelated people to future performances of my students, to promote my program and demonstrate the contributions dance makes to my students' lives. While the line about one of the shows just being "free entertainment" could be seen as too dismissive and self-deprecating, it was actually chosen specifically to appeal to the invitee's sensibilities, thus demonstrating how I personalize my invitations to the recipient.