Curriculum Design

Tonight in my "Professional Issues in Dance Education" we worked on making sense of our main concepts in our vision statements which are formulating our curriculum proposals. During the summer and in the fall we began thinking about our curriculum and now we are actually pulling out what our main goals are in our curriculum that will help us develop our it. The process of finding our most important goals and concepts came from picking reoccurring and over stressed values, beliefs, and skills that we talked about in our teaching vision. Using those concepts/goals we put them in order of what is most important and developed a paragraph around what our ideal student would be like at the end of our program. We used that paragraph to get really specific with goals that would facilitate our curriculum, put them down on paper, and organized them in a way that would being to develop our curriculum. Then we discussed and defended our choices and ideas.

Hear are two pictures that represent my process for developing a curriculum.

This first picture is taken from a power point presentation I put together this summer about my curricular ideas. Basically the picture represents goal setting as the main idea and then these four dance related subtopics that would be the foundation of my curriculum.

The next photo is my most recent development of the structure of my curriculum which utilizes the four cornerstones from above and goal setting but has developed further. Instead of goal setting being the number one goal of my program life skills has now taken that title and goal setting is a sub-topic. This is just a picture of my brain playing around with my goals. 

Can you tell I like pink?

The Teaching Professional

Yesterday began the second half of my "Teaching Professional" course which focuses on the laws around teaching. This class teaches us about the different positions within a school or district and what types of decisions they make. This class will also teach us about the rights we have as teachers and other things like teacher duties and salary. For the introduction of the course the professor targeted the school board, superintendent, principal and vice principal. She had a lot of information to offer about  these positions which I really had no knowledge of. For example school boards are made up of people who generally have no background in education but are using the position as a political stepping stone. I believe this isn't beneficial because the school board holds responsibility for things like hiring a principal, curriculum content, and what books are being banned in the school. I think it's really ineffective that people who have no knowledge about an educational system or pedagogy get to determine what we teach. There is a lot of talk in this country about how poor our education system is and I think this has a lot to do with it.

We also spoke about superintendents which are responsible for hiring and firing, tackling the business side of education, and development of buildings. The salary of a superintendent in New Jersey is generally around $350,000/year. Next on the chain of administration are school principals ($120,000-$200,00/year) who are the face of all of the decisions made by the school board and superintendent. The principal mostly deals with the problems the arise from those decisions, hiring and firing of teachers, and teacher evaluations. Lastly, vice principals ($80,000-$150,000/year) act as a support to the principal in handling the problems of the school. Mostly vice principals deal with discipline and behavior issues of the students in the building.

Here is a link to the New Jersey School Board Association homepage which has a lot of interesting information.

http://www.njsba.org/

Spring Break

I just wanted to take the time to recap on my spring break which wasn't very eventful but still some stuff worth talking about. I originally planned on flying out to Los Angeles for the week to visit my older brother but because I had some workshops to attend I didn't make it. I didn't really have much planned for the break except resting, working, rehearsals, and getting my wisdom teeth pulled!

 On my first weekend off I decided to find a place to go hiking because I've become pretty jealous of my brothers hiking adventures in LA. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon so my boyfriend and I decided to go for a hike somewhere in New Jersey (I would tell you where but I have no idea). Half way into our hike we stopped and he carved our names into a tree. Vomit worthy? Yes, but I still thought it was cute!

My week started off pretty great with work and rehearsals but after getting my wisdom teeth pulled and catching a virus it went down hill pretty quickly. The second week of my time off was spent in my bed in pain and just trying to rest so I would be okay for the coming weekend and going back to classes.

Laban Movement Workshop

Over my spring I attend a workshop that is helping to full fill a graduation requirement that I am missing. The workshop was held in Manhattan at the Laban Institute and it was an Intro to Laban Movement Analysis. As a dance educator this is important material that will aide in my teaching. Laban is a technique used to analyze how and why the body moves and it helps you understand how your own body moves. Learning more about how my body moves and what boundaries can be pushed I am better suited to helping my students learn about their bodies. Laban also deals with principles of movement structure and purpose. There is so much to learn about this technique but in the workshop which is geared toward dancers and non-dancers we focused on the most important and valuable concepts. In Laban there is also motif writing which is series of symbols used to write movement. Laban also looks at movement from a mathematical view point which I found really difficult because that isn't my strongest area. It is also important to know that Laban isn't only used in dance but it is also used in acting, exercise, public speaking, and therapy. This school offers programs where you can become a certified movement analyst (CMA) which helps people develop their communication skills through movement. There are so many components to Laban and I don't have a great deal of knowledge about all of them but I am posting a link to the school's website so you can check it out for yourself. I'm also leaving you with some pictures of the material I studied at my workshop. Enjoy!


http://www.limsonline.org/home

Thursday March 8th

On Thursday I had my ICD class once again and we continued to talk about gender and the different way it can be defined. We had an assignment to visit YouTube and look up the video "Killing Us Softly" which is a video about how women are portrayed in the media. The video did a really great job of providing images that show how negatively women can be portrayed in the media. This video also brought up and good point about how these images in the media hold women up to unrealistic expectations. Here is the video so you can see it for yourself!

Killing Us Softly 3

Hey everyone! This semester I'm taking four other courses which are Individual and Cultural Diversity, The Teaching Professional, Professional Issues in Dance Education, and Yoga for Dancers. This week I am also starting a weekend course in Manhattan for Laban Movement Studies. This is my last semester at Rutgers and I am expected to graduate this May with a Masters degree in Dance Education! 


This week in my cultural diversity class we are talking about issues of gender in society and classrooms. We read a classic children's story "The Giving Tree" about a tree (portrayed as a female) and a young boy. If you are not familiar with the story when the boy is young he always plays with the tree and they enjoy each others company but as the boy grows up their relationship begins to dwindle. The older the boy gets the less he hangs around the tree and only comes over to her when he needs something, the tree gives and gives until she is nothing but a stump. Half of the class was given the original story and the other was given the same story but with the roles reversed the tree a man and then a girl instead of a boy. As a class we analyzed how both the female and male roles in each story align with our beliefs about gender in society. 


A link to t he story if you'd like to read it: http://the-giving-tree.info/


Here are some of the words that the class came up with to describe each:

It was really interesting to see how we automatically associated these characteristics according to gender. In my class we agreed that this is how we portray gender in our own lives, many of the students described the young boy as a "typical guy". It was also eye opening to recognize that a famous children's book could somewhat be to blame for who children grow up to be. Our professor encouraged us to choose the books we give our students wisely and to try and remain gender neutral in our choices. 


What do you think? 


Here is a link to an article I discovered about terrible lessons within children's books and "The Giving Tree" was on there. 

http://voices.yahoo.com/4-beloved-childrens-books-terrifying-7998294.html?cat=25