By Jill Randall

 

 

 

Today's post takes inspiration from a project I did this summer with dancer Leah Cox, who is the Associate Dean of the American Dance Festival. I asked Leah to join me on this blog this summer – sharing a weekly journal entry of sorts about the festival, her teaching, and percolating ideas.

 

Leah shared numerous wonderful posts, which you can find linked here. Leah commented about this project, that:

 

I often reflect on my class in writing for my own purposes, but those reflections are usually meant for me alone. They are lists of future activities, ideas for improvement, or assessments of what’s going on. Writing a short, reflective essay for Jill’s blog—often with her giving me some ideas for what I might write about—forced me to think about my class differently. I had to consider how my class might be relevant to or communicate to an audience beyond me or my students. I located my work within a larger context. This has been inspiring to me, as it encourages me to reflect with a different lens and level of cohesiveness. I have also shared my writing with my students, which I appreciate because it’s a way for them to understand the class from a different perspective as well. I would like to continue this practice…I wonder if I could generate a list of prompts for myself to engage in each week, or reach out to a colleague to ask them to exchange prompts and stimulate a dialogue. 

Today, I encourage all of the dance teaching artists out there to spend a few weeks writing about your classes, whether you teach children, teens, or adults. You do not have to share this writing with anyone. Do it for yourself. Do it to deepen your work, question your work, articulate your work. 

 

Yes, writing on dance is necessary for our press releases, website content, and social media efforts. And, writing can be valuable, informative, and enlivening to our teaching practice as well. Give it a try! 

 

You can answer many different questions, or simply free write each week about your teaching. Possibly set a timer – ask yourself to write for 10 minutes straight. Then go back and re-read it. Circle words or phrases that strike you. Maybe riff off of those circled words the next time you sit down to write, and so on.

 

If you are interested, here are some of the questions I posed to Leah Cox about her Choreolab course at ADF:

• For your first post, do you want to write a little about the course you are teaching and what you are excited about with it? What is your personal teaching challenge/goal for the summer?
• Do you want to write about inspiration? How do you inspire students? How do the students inspire you?
• How does seeing performances this summer at ADF directly inspire you, and you bring ideas immediately back into your classes?
• What if the next post is about growth and change – what you are seeing in your students? And the invitation for risk taking and experimentation? 

Summer Correspondence: Leah Cox at ADF (June 25)

Summer Correspondence: Leah Cox at ADF (July 3)

Summer Correspondence: Leah Cox at ADF (July 10)

Summer Correspondence: Leah Cox at ADF (July 16)

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