The Use of Dance as an Educational Tool
by Tamara Halbritter

Across the U.S., dance is being used as an educational tool to help teach a variety of subjects including science, math and history. Integrating dance into the elementary and secondary school curricula enables students to expand their cognitive abilities on a variety of subjects while improving their spatial awareness, body awareness and sense of individuality and community. It also allows for three learning styles: visual, auditory and tactile.
Dance provides the opportunity to reach all students whether they learn best in one particular style or in a combination of styles. A visual learner, for instance, needs to see the concept presented. Dance can give this type of learner a visual and active representation of the topic which may be more meaningful than books, flashcards or films.
An auditory learner remembers sounds and conversations about a specific subject. For these kinds of learners, dance can be combined with speech to make lasting impressions. The teacher may narrate a particular scene as it occurs or the students may augment the movement with noises that represent the objects of study.
A tactile learner excels in school when he or she take notes and refers to real-world examples or enacts a scene in relation to the study topic. Dance can provide a theatrical setting for role playing, giving students a chance to "feel" the situation.
All three learning styles can be influenced by dance to help teach a variety of subjects. A science course focusing on astronomy, for example, can benefit from having the class "become" the planets, sun, moon and stars in our solar system. One student can move to the center of the room and be the Earth, while another student glides around the Earth as the "Moon." Eight other students can represent planets, and travel in their respective rotations around another student, the Sun. Additional students may portray the stars of a particular constellation being studied. Learning about the solar system in this manner reaches the range of learning styles in the classroom and also develops the students’ spatial awareness.
Dance can be used just as effectively as an educational tool for math. Simple concepts such as addition or subtraction can become much easier to understand when students see objects being added, subtracted, multiplied or divided. To reach all three types of learners, the teacher can call out an addition problem and students can watch the assigned movers become part of the sum total.
A history class may find a historical event easier to remember by having the students use their textbook as a reference to act out the event. This theatrical movement can be referred to as dance. Other subjects such as reading may be effectively taught through dance by coaching the students to become syllables of words or move in different positions to create various sentences.
Regardless of the subject matter being taught with dance, in all cases, students are allowed choices within the assignment. For instance, when replicating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, played by a student, might be given a chance to act out the meaning of this document with all of the people who approved it. The student in science class moving as Mars may be given a set path to follow, but can invent a way to rotate on her or her "axis" while moving along this path. In the math example, a group of four students may be directed to create their own multiplication problem.
When making these kinds of choices through dance, students not only learn the subject at hand, but also hone their critical thinking skills. They can concentrate on the lesson and value it even if they don’t recognize that it addresses their particular learning style. The students feel a part of the action, both as an individual and as a member of the whole. In addition, the experience can be much more memorable than traditional education methods.