Dance Curriculum Designs creates print material to serve the innate tactile needs of users, especially children’s. Compared to previous generations, today’s child is noticeably in deficit of tactile experiences and human touch. Person to person interaction is diminished today because of the need of(and the dependence on)electronic media. Screens (large and small) provide so much of the daily information, its assistance is valuable. However, the more time spent at the keyboard and screen the less hours are available for exercise, sports, exploring the natural world, tactile experiences, meaningful human interaction, and the development of social skills for personal satisfaction.
Dance Curriculum Designs takes seriously is mantra, “to inform and inspire.” Those who have read my textbook, Teaching Dance as Art in Education, will recall how the page design places inspirational passages and quotations in the center of the page and then prints the informational segments around them. It makes the inspired quotation the focal point while you are gathering important information from the text itself.
Education is best when it imparts information alongside inspiration. That is what we mean by “inform and inspire”—whether we are writing textbooks for teacher preparation or creating K-16 classroom materials to increase dance teacher effectiveness and quality interaction with students.
In the case of Dance Curriculum Designs’ uniquely designed toolkits, you find that each kit integrates “information with inspiration” too.
- The information is presented as the main concepts on posters and focus charts. They include the principles, processes, and structures of each Artistic Process.
- For example, Toolkit One: Viewing Dance [responding’s artistic principles, processes, and structures], Toolkit Two: Creating Dance [creating‘s principles, processes, and structures], and Toolkit Three: Composing Dance [creating’s structures].
- The inspiration comes in the form of creative catalysts in each toolkit. They are customized and to spark the creative process, instill the big ideas, facilitate inquiry, and inspire students to be “Supported, Successful, and Satisfied” during their learning experience.
- It is the combined interaction of the educational posters and the creative catalysts in each toolkit that exponentially increases the entire learning community’s skills in dance as well as literacy in dance’s four artistic processes.
Dance Curriculum Designs materials span many different ages and stages of development from Grade 1-12, higher education, and adult learners.
Dance Curriculum Designs totally subscribes to the theory of the 6DC Model of Educational Dance which I presented in my first textbook, Teaching Dance as Art in Education.
DCD products are the outgrowth of that model. The materials are:
- Comprehensive(holistic study of all 4 artistic processes)
- Substantive(rich content, teaching the main concepts that drive dance)
- Sequential(developmental, adding complexity to increase skills & literacy)
- Artistically driven (focused on refining one’s skills and artistic expression)
- Contextually coherent(units that create an artistic context around great works of dance)
- Inquiry-based(teacher actively involves student in his/her own learning-agency)
Dance Curriculum Designs only creates “6DC certified” resources. DCD is the only company with 6DC certified teaching and learning materials in the world. Its resources are designed to activate key theories presented in Teaching Dance as Art in Education (BP McCutchen. Human Kinetics, 2006) and to facilitate a standards-enhanced curriculum in K-12 and beyond.
May you thrive in your teaching and may your students grow literate and skilled in all of dance’s artistic processes!
Do you realize that Dance Curriculum Designs doesn’t sell electronic products? We design hard-copy resources to take into the classroom to facilitate inquiry and increase literacy in dance’s artistic processes. Our print products are intentionally designed to be hands-on, used in multiple settings, used inside or out, in rooms or studios with or without screens, so as to move humans away from screens to encourage interaction and negotiation face to face. DCD resources are designed to be manipulated in the classroom for the betterment of human interaction and education.
Brenda Pugh McCutchen, created Dance Curriculum Designs™ for the 21st century in the year 2000 just as she began writing dance education’s foundation textbook for higher education for undergraduate and graduate studies. While writing this text, Teaching Dance as Art in Education (2006, Human Kinetics), McCutchen envisioned it as containing the “holistic theory” which also needed to be packaged with four teaching toolkits with creative catalysts—one kit for each artistic process–creating, performing, responding, and relating. Little did she realize the time it took to create and produce each toolkit is the same as writing an entire textbook because each toolkit is like the design of a textbook, just in separate pieces. Nonetheless, two kits are in print (one for critiquing and one for creating) and the newest kit (on dance composition) will be finished as soon as the manual is complete, so she looks forward to seeing it out soon.