A few years later I found myself teaching at Georges Vanier Fine Arts School. There I had the good fortune to work with professional artist, and dance instructor Mike Mirlin. At the time I had a classroom full of cool jocks. The kind of kids that you could easily assume would be afraid to dance in front of their peers and their refusal to participate would make it difficult for others to feel secure enough to try. Well that was not the case. It was Mike's first year at Vanier and after showing the kids a few cool hip hop moves, the kids were enthralled.
During my time at Vanier, I underestimated the value or the importance of dance. I failed to properly recognize what it was doing for our students. I didn't see it until I moved to St. Anne School. When it comes to performing: dancing, acting, giving a book talk, or describing what you've learned, the Vanier kids just had so much more natural confidence. They were used to performing. Every time that you get up to present something to a group - it is a performance and a huge personal risk. Kids know this.
At St. Anne School, our kids are routinely asked to demonstrate their learning for others. Over the course of a year, I can see that the kids get more comfortable with speaking in front of others. Seriously though, there is nothing that creates more confidence in yourself than successfully performing a dance, a play, or a song in front of others.
Think back to your most confident fantasy as a middle years student. What was it? You were a rock star singing on stage for your school. That imaginary performance let your peers see just how cool you really were, right? Well, maybe it was just me.
Last year we had Amanda Murray come and instruct our students for one day during our TreatySmarts project. She was so cool that even my "coolest" or most frightened student was trying to follow her lead. It was not really what I expected. I wished that we had had more money and time to have her work more with our kids.
For our ArtsSmarts grant project this year, we are working with Mike Mirlin. I wanted Mike to work with us because I knew he was a strong instructor and that it would be good for our students to see that dancing is not just for girls, but for strong confident men as well.
Mike started to teach the students a small robotic dance number on the very first day. We crammed all 32 kids into the band room, which was not nearly enough space, and he showed them what they would work on. I can't adequately explain how cool this dance was, but Mike looked like a machine. His body had stopping points, like it had hinges. If you don't think that's difficult, stop reading, run to a mirror and try it. It's hard.Without exception, every kid wanted to learn how to move like that. By the end of the hour, the dance was learned and I got to watch as 33 people moved like robots to the music. It gave me shivers. I was thrilled for my students.
In the next few sessions, Mike instructed all students. It was apparent to anyone working with us, that the kids were pumped. We heard from several students that they were practising at home or getting together to practice with each other. For those of you who work with kids, it's a pretty good sign that they interested in a subject when they go home and do the work on their own. For me this was like a hole in one!
After a few weeks, we had to ask students to choose which discipline they wanted to work in: dance or music/spoken word/rap. Many students were conflicted. They wanted to do both, which was something that I didn't really expect.
I have to diverge here and say that our original plan was to have kids choose one form of art: graffiti art, dance, or music/spoken work /rap. A wrench was thrown into our plan when Pavlo received his residency rotation schedule and we realized that all of the work he was going to do with our students had to be completed after school and in the evening. To adapt to his schedule, we only gave the students two choices: dance or music/spoken word/rap. This was a relief to many students who wanted to be involved with the mural and do one of the other genres.
When you plan an activity of this nature, you always expect that someone will shy away from all aspects of art. I had a few kids in mind that I thought we might be able to have work as light and sound technicians and behind-the-scenes people. When choices were all made, there was no one left over who hadn't decided what they wanted to do. Having to find behind-the-scenes jobs for students became a moot point. Between our two classrooms, we have 57 kids working on this project, and 45 students chose to work with Mike on dance.
Mike had the students divide themselves into groups. Before he did this he spoke to the kids about how to chose your group. We were worried, as teachers always are, that someone might get left out and that's a blow to the ego that we don't want anyone to feel. The groups formed and we had three girl crews and 3three boy crews. They crews then had to give their group a name, and decide on a culture they wanted to try to represent through hip hop.
I realize that asking kids to represent culture through art is a daunting task. To help them with this, Mike showed us a YouTube video that we could use as a starting place:
Quick Crew - China Concept
We watched many videos with students during our time with them, when the artists weren't at school. The students chose a culture that they wanted to learn about, did research, and wrote a report. We watched several videos where artists spoke out for change, and we learned about the globalization of culture. We also had to determine "What is culture?" I will write more about our part in the process in another blog post, but for this post, I just want to be clear that as teachers we supported the learning around culture and didn't just throw that at students without giving them the knowledge and front-end loading.
I'm not sure how students determined what culture they are representing. Watching their performances, it is clear that some groups demonstrate their learning in a much more concrete way than others. One of our groups has performed their dance around their learning from last year's TreatySmarts project. They have named themselves Empire and their dance demonstrates how Britain ruled over First Nation peoples. They wanted to be historically accurate, so they do have a choreographed battle scene. Another group is demonstrating Canadian hockey culture. Strangely, they do not have a fight scene in their dance. :)
The process of choreographing their dance happened over several weeks. We had students in every nook and cranny of our school working out their dance together. Mike went from group to group guiding and giving suggestions. His rule for them was simple: "You don't shut down someone else's idea."
To me, this is where the real learning happened. The kids had to learn to work together listening to someone's suggestion and figuring out how to work it into their piece. They also had to learn to give and take feedback from each other. This process didn't always go smoothly. I overheard Mike say to groups, "Well, then, you get 8 beats to decide what the group is doing; everyone gets 8 beats." I also heard him with one group of girls saying that since they were always shutting down each others' ideas and not listening to each other that each person would decide what to do in 8 beats. In those 8 beats they would entertain suggestions, and then be the final decision maker. As the choreographer of 8 beats you could say no to everyone, but no one could say no to you. Through these challenges, and through working through them, Mike gave the students tools to deal with conflict. He gave them the skills they needed to work together.
We often think of working together as something kids need to figure out when working in groups in Social or Science. We often overlook the power of the Arts. Here, students are learning to dance, and, on the surface, it may seem superficial or frivolous. We don't realize that there is way more going on in the process. Kids are learning to work together, to co-create, and to be creative. Seriously, there are some higher level thought processes going on when students are working in the Arts.
Another benefit of a project like this is that all kids have a voice. All kids are actively helping to create this performance. In other subjects, group work unfolds as the "leaders" being the boss, the kids who care about marks take on more work, and those kids who like to coast through things often get to coast. I really don't think that happened within these dance groups. If it did, it certainly wasn't as obvious.
To support this work, Dianne and I gave the groups time to perform nearly every day. When the dancers were dancing, the poets were writing or performing for each other. This work could not be done well without giving students time to work in their crews daily.
Once all of the group choreography was completed, Mike started a dance number with all students. This will be the final dance performance. I think that most of the poets were happy to get to be part of the final dance. They have witnessed what their peers were doing and even though their raps and poems are cool and were fun to work on, they still wanted to dance.
I would work with Mike again. I think the students at Vanier are fortunate to get to work with Mike and have a weekly dance class all year long. As educators, we need to understand the benefit for students and advocate for the Arts. The push for us to teach the core subjects of math, Language Arts, Science and Social Studies by governments and the Ministry means that sometimes we forget that the Arts are a core subject. They have their place in our students' lives. It's up to us as educators to help governments realize their importance. We also need to help build the Arts into our schools and classrooms.
Thank you to the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their financial support through an ArtsSmarts grant. The value of this project for our students is immeasurable.
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