'Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand.' Anonymous.
I want to introduce you to Afzal and Anna. They are seven and eight years old, respectively, and have been living in London since their families moved here in 1997. And to Shamal and Priscilla, who are both seven years old. Shamal only recently moved to London from the Middle East, and is learning to speak English. Priscilla is bi-lingual and often translates for her mother, who does not speak English at all. I would like you to meet all those children we worked with on Dancing the Words (DTW). I wish they could tell you themselves what the project meant to and for them. Because I do not want it to disappear into the past, to become four big bulging lever-arch files on my shelf that my successor one day flicks through and decides whether to keep or bin. So I must do a bit of trumpet-blowing, to acknowledge our hard work and energy and to keep the dust from settling on it.
DTW was not my brainchild. I inherited it when I arrived in post as Education Officer. Credit for creating the project goes to Chris Thomson, my director, and Jane Fulford, head teacher at Winton Primary School. I did not do any of the fundraising either. The project was primarily supported by the Department for Education and Skills: Partners for Study Support Scheme. I did what I believe to be the most rewarding bit, actually: I got to deliver it - to teach it, to plan it, to manage it. Amongst many rewards, I got to learn too - about creating and maintaining a relationship between an arts organisation and a school, its staff and pupils. And my science knowledge is now probably better than it ever was at school. I had a lot of fun. We all did.
Dancing the Words was a dance and science project, which did exactly what it said on the tin. It danced the words - in this case the key scientific vocabulary and concepts. What was originally conceived as a dance and language project soon evolved into a dance and science project, to meet the pupils' particular needs. The head teacher had cited language acquisition and the grasping of abstract concepts as weaknesses in the classroom. So the primary aim of DTW was to enhance language and conceptual skills in children at Key Stage 2.
Put yourself in this life, this scene. Your name is Mohamed. You are 7 years old. You only arrived in London from Turkey a few months ago. Mum and Dad are applying for permanent housing in Tottenham, but until that happens they, you and your three brothers are all living in a tiny one-bedroom flat in Kings Cross. You speak very little English, but you watch lots of telly so you are picking up some cool words. You come to school every day but you are not that sure about it - it feels big and strange and very noisy. And what's with this uniform business? Everyone looks the same. At this rate you will never learn what your new friends are called. Your teacher is named Mrs. Derbyshire. She is very nice. She makes you word cards for objects around the classroom - written in your language and then in English too. She sticks them onto the objects so that every time you sit at your table or go to look at the whiteboard, you remember what the word is in English - this new language that you need to learn as soon as you can.
This was a question in your science test today:
'You hold two magnets close together. You feel them trying to move apart.
This is:
a. attraction
b. polarisation
c. repulsion
d. revulsion
(Please circle the correct answer)'
You just do not understand. What does magnets mean? What are those other big words? How can you sit this test successfully when you are still Stumbling over the words in English for table, for lunch, for toilet?
This was essentially where Dancing the Words worked at its best. Mohamed and those children like him with English as an additional language, those children who were physical learners, those children with special educational needs they were our success stories. There were dozens of them. At the peak of the project we were delivering five weekly dance sessions, within the school timetable, across Years three, four and five. This was done using the principles of Accelerated Learning (1) and Multiple Intelligences (2). In the broadest terms we took learning out of the classroom and encouraged the children to access information in a variety of ways. We worked visually - using word flash cards, objects, showing movement to each other. We worked aurally - listening, discussing each others' movement work, chanting specially devised 'raps' devised to help salient pieces of information or vocabulary 'stick'. We worked physically - putting actions to those 'raps', or devising creative movement tasks that enabled the children to imagine being magnets, as an example, and then to actually embody those magnets attracting and repelling. Changes started to become apparent in the pupils' understanding. At our weekly planning and evaluation meetings we would compare notes on individual children - the girl who put her hand up for the first time to answer a science question, in English, correctly the boy who needed constant one-to-one support in the classroom, yet found he could concentrate for longer and retain more information in a DTW session because he was 'doing' his science physically. The anecdotes were endless, but they alone hardly constitute a scientific finding. This led us to evaluate and monitor more closely, which led us to commission a report of our findings, both scientific and anecdotal; what we discovered through topic testing, but also what we saw, heard, felt and thought. But more of that later.
If you know or can imagine your average inner city primary school in a deprived area, then you will also have a sense of the importance and value a project such as DTW can be to the pupils involved. It was all about partnerships - between our department and the school, between Chris and Jane, between me, Imogen and Gill (the dance team in year two of the project) and our class teachers Leigh, Wendy, Reuben, Jez and Clair. It was about the partnership between dance and science, movement and words. And the partnership between what we did in the dance session and how that was taken back into the classroom and recapped in a different learning environment.
Allow me to state what seems obvious: children learn better when not just sitting at a desk listening. Dance is a perfect tool to facilitate this. Proving that that is the case is harder, but we have had a go. We were lucky to have a Surrey University placement student, Polly Risbridger, with us at the very start of DTW. She came back in her final year and based her dissertation on this project, using case studies and statistical analysis. We were also fortunate that her placement predecessor, Cindy Gower, agreed to be an external evaluator on the project. Her resulting report is now completed and being sent to the project funders and other interested parties.
I know of other fantastic projects linking dance to curriculum studies that have taken place in recent months and during the past few years. But proving that dance can contribute in a very real way to delivering and supporting the National Curriculum in our schools is a hard task. Correlating the evidence in powerful lobbying documents is even more time-consuming. The government's Creative Partnerships (CP) (ref 3) funding scheme is welcome recognition of the value that the arts can have in the curriculum. The aim of this funding programme, in the words of the Arts Council, is... 'To ensure that creativity, imagination and innovative thinking are at the heart of children's experiences in schools'.
I went back to the school earlier last term, to talk to the Year six teachers at the end of the school day. We wanted to track the current Year six pupils who had been involved with the project for two years of their schooling, through to their Science SATS (Standard Attainment Testing) results. All but one of the teachers were new to the school and, therefore, to the project. The meeting itself was not all that productive. They were embroiled in the great SATS dilemma, and during the course of our short visit meeting one of the teachers had to leave to deal with an aggressive parent. You forget - I forget - the daily trouble-shooting, counselling and parenting skills that teachers need to display on top of their teaching demands. I came away feeling a little down, as though all of our work - two years of delivery of planning and devising, of developing good working relationships with the staff involved - all of it had been forgotten. And then a lovely thing happened. As I was leaving the school I got mobbed, and I mean quite literally, by children in the playground. Those familiar little faces - each a little older but just as eager to please, to annoy, to get noticed, to stay unnoticed. 'Miss, Miss ... Look! my electricity dance!' ... 'Miss Lucy! Lucy, when are we doing Dancing the Words again?' ... 'Lucy, Lucy ... We did our magnets dance for assembly again!'....'Look, Miss, look: 'North to north will repel, south to south will as well.' See? I remembered it!' ... 'Lucy, where is Gill? Where is Imogen? Are you coming back?!'
And so it went on. It is a tiny playground, but it took me a long time to cross it and leave. In fact I did not want to leave at all. Here was my justification for all that time and energy, all those resources and three or four times weekly 12-minute speed walks up the Euston Road to the school. Here was my evaluation - anecdotal and personal, but just as valid as all the science test results and project evaluations. Here, unequivocally, was my 'yes' moment. Nobody else saw it. Maybe nobody else needed to. But I came back to my desk and related it word for word, action for action to Chris and Louise. And we reminded each other that we had made a difference, for a while, there with those children.
Dancing the Words was consuming and exhausting, frustrating and wonderful, difficult and easy. When I first approached the possibility of writing something about this project, I was talked through some initial thoughts. From my scribbled notes at that time four words jump off the page - partnership, evaluation, art, impact. Dancing the Words ticked all of those boxes. But now what? Well, I can happily report that we are currently working with Scottish Youth Dance (Y Dance) to develop an interactive CD Rom - lesson plans, science 'raps', etc - with a view to putting the body of work we created 'out there' and into the hands and computers of teachers up and down the country. That is teachers, not dance specialists necessarily. I can also tell you that we are about to embark on a two-year project with another primary school. The focus will be on Animating Literacy, a project funded by Creative Partnerships and monitored and supported by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education. That is dance and language, instead of dance and science, but so much of our acquired knowledge, skills and hindsight from DTW are directly transferable. So we are trying to keep looking forward, to bring everything we have learned and developed into the future with us; to roll out, disseminate and, in those rare, spare moments ... the c-word... congratulate each other.
We all have our 'yes' projects. This was mine. Permission to shout about it, please. Permission for us all to shout about the productive and empowering experiences we bring to young people through dance.
I will leave the last word for Hafiz, aged seven and a DTW pupil: 'When we dance the meaning, I find it much easier to remember my science.'
(Some names have been changed in the above article.)
References
1. Accelerated Learning in the Classroom - Alistair Smith, Network Educational Press Ltd 1996
2. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences - Howard Gardner, Fontana, London 1993
3. www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding
To contact Lucy email Lucy.Moelwyn@theplace.org.uk or telephone 020 7388 8956