DEL Calendar

In this six-module course, participants delve into the key components of cultivating culturally responsive pedagogy in dance education drawing from key video resources created especially for DEL by Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown.

The course is built around Dr. McCarthy-Brown’s curated videos and additional resources designed to guide dance educators through a process of self-examination and teacher reflection; as well as provide culturally responsive teaching tools. Participants will examine how culture, identity, and race show up in their teaching practice and will be asked to reflect on how race and other marginalizing stereotypes operate in their learning environments. In addition, participants will be given building blocks of culturally responsive teaching strategies to de-center Whiteness in the dance classroom.

Must register by Wednesday, April 5, 2023.

DELving into Embodied Dance History is a six-module asynchronous course designed for dance educators who want to re-imagine American modern dance history through the lens of embodied and inquiry-based learning.

Course content is derived from the DEL at Jacob’s Pillow DELving into Dance History series, created by Ann Biddle and Felice Santorelli, and investigates dance artists through multiple contextual lenses in order to gain a holistic and more inclusive understanding of dance history. Participants will engage in collaborative research, have access to multi-modal course resources and primary sources, and interact with the rich content on the Jacob’s Pillow interactive site.

Must register by Wednesday, May 17, 2023.

The DEL Essentials course is an introductory course that provides an overview of the key components of the DEL model of teaching dance to children and teenagers.

The Dance Education Laboratory environment encourages active movement participation and performance, peer collaboration, discussion, observation, and oral and written reflection. DEL Essentials embraces multiple perspectives and is designed to meet the unique needs of each participant. Students will explore components of the DEL Model and will:

• Apply the LMA framework to lesson planning and dance making
• Understand the benefits of a comprehensive dance educationg
• Explore the concept of the movement sentence in varied waysg
• Design meaningful lesson plans following the DEL Lesson Plan formatg
• Gain an overview of how to support learners in all developmental stagesg
• Engage with current dance education including state and national dance standardsg
• Work collaboratively to create group dances with peers

Must register by Friday, June 30, 2023.

DEL’s Dance for Early Childhood Curriculum encourages learning through play, providing a stimulating, multi-sensory, and nurturing community for diverse young learners to discover their innate movement capacity.

Participants in this course will gain experience in creating developmentally appropriate dance lessons and activities for children ages 3-7 years old. Interactive and participatory, this course will cover the following topics: developmentally appropriate lessons and content for early childhood, developmental patterns and the sensory system, games and short activities, basics of early childhood dance lesson planning, applied LMA vocabulary as a springboard for dance learning and lesson plan organization, strategies for effective teaching, working with children with disabilities, teaching children online, using video prompts, and collaborative lesson planning with peers.

Must register by Wednesday, July 5, 2023.

In this weeklong intensive, participants will delve into the DEL Tracing Footsteps Journey Into Jazz Dance — Let’s Swing!curriculum, created in 2022 in response to the need to provide high-quality dance education instruction to K-12 NYC public school students.

The Tracing Footsteps: Journey Into Jazz Dance — Let’s Swing!  curriculum focuses on examining the roots of African American vernacular jazz dance and the emergence of the Lindy Hop in the ballrooms of New York’s Harlem in the 1920s-1940s. In addition, the curriculum will acknowledge the lineage of key dance, music, and African American cultural traditions that created the foundation of contemporary jazz dance forms.

Participants will receive an overview of each module, explore components of the grade band-specific dance units, engage in culturally responsive pedagogy practices, identify innovative instructional practices, and apply the DEL model to collaborative dance making and lesson plan design. Through embodied practice, collective inquiry, and exposure to a wide range of resources (guest dance artists and facilitators, video tutorials, and visually stimulating teaching materials), participants will learn how to bring dance history to life in their dance classrooms.

Must register by Wednesday, July 12, 2023.