DEL Lab Schools Feature: Lauren Alzos-Benke
We’re so excited to begin spotlighting our 2024 DEL Lab Schools recipients. Join us in celebrating Lauren Alzos-Benke!
Lauren Alzos-Benke (MA Dance Education, New York University, MS Social Work, Fordham University) teaches dance with a focus on choreography at Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn.
She founded the program in 2009, after seven years as a foreign language classroom teacher. Lauren believes that every person has a unique way of moving, and students in her class discover more about themselves through risky, creative endeavors resulting in original choreography.
She has partnered with the Center for Family Life, a community agency in Sunset Park, for 10 years in an afterschool program, Life Lines. In this program, students from the neighborhood create and perform a full-length, original, improvisation-based musical each spring.
Lauren’s students at Sunset Park High School
At Sunset Park High School, Lauren has created a unique curriculum that includes a required 10th grade class as well as dance electives in Ballet and Choreography.
Her teaching career began as a foreign language teacher in Harlem in 2003. Approached by students to start a drama club, she helped them to found an after school club that put on several musicals and plays. A principal who served as her mentor encouraged her to pursue dance teaching, and she is grateful that she did.
Lauren enrolled in DEL programs and earned her professional certification through the master’s program in dance education at NYU. Now, combining her background in teaching, social work, and dance, Lauren brings dance to the community of Sunset Park through the high school and her partnership with Center for Family Life.
Lauren grew up in Delaware where she was a student at the award-winning Anna Marie Dance Studio from age 3-18.
Lauren’s students at Sunset Park High School
We asked Lauren to answer the following questions:
A. What is one of the biggest learnings or takeaways that has stuck with you from a DEL Course/Workshop?
I believe it was dance teacher extraordinaire Randi Sloan who told us that the motto for her dance class is “take a risk.” I connected with this idea – that creating and participating in art will be risky, and higher levels of creativity and innovation are associated with taking larger risks. I have co-opted this motto for my class as well, and find that students respond by pushing themselves to be more confident and original, and to ultimately be brave enough to embrace themselves as individuals.
B. How do you apply the DEL Model in your teaching environment? Tell us more about how you use what you’ve learned from DEL in your real life.
I took the DEL Foundations course in 2009 as I was transitioning from teaching foreign language to teaching dance. It was an instrumental part of developing the curriculum I’ve created at Sunset Park High School. I really use the model as a framework for all of my teaching. Because I teach a required course for all 10th graders, I’ve approached the class as primarily a choreography class. When the students see that the material is accessible and doesn’t depend on perfectly executed technique, they open up to the idea of creating dance and moving in their own ways.
C. At the center of the DEL Model is the Teacher’s Heart, which represents the core artistic and philosophical values and beliefs of every dance educator. Lauren shared:
The educator-philosopher Maxine Greene spoke of education being like a window that we open for students so they can see something that they didn’t know was there.
I fully embrace dance education as a chance to break students out into the unknown. When I show them a dance or teach them a technique they have never seen or heard of, it is a window opening for them. I regularly try to engage them in debate, to boggle their minds, to show them things that they will think are weird. I want to challenge them to look beyond themselves and what they know and to have an open mind for the future.