Rebecca has been experimenting with combining maths and dance at Seagrave School for a whole school year now, from September 2004. She has been interested in the affinities between dance and maths since her late teens, and has always wanted to try to combine them in her school practice, but needed a relationship with a school that was close and lasting, to enable her and the teachers to experiment confidently. Thus this year has been a year of piloting various ideas and practices.
The areas she has covered include triangles, co-ordinates, counting, shape, number bonds, sequencing, fractions, degrees, and place value. She has worked with years 1 to 5, and has developed and delivered a training programme for teachers and artists.
Initially the work was planned with maths as the focus and dance as a tool for teaching the concepts, but over the year, she has been able to move increasingly to a more creative model, where the children use less equipment and rely more intensively on their imaginations. The work has also progressed so that while maths is the initial stimulus, the importance of dance, dance skills, and crucially a dance performance has become equally important. The teaching of dance techniques alongside maths concepts has increased until the two are of roughly equal importance.
Children have also been able to control more of the process themselves, and there are fewer rules about how to respond with their bodies, more freedom to interpret and play with the concepts involved.
This involved both teacher and artist relaxing their grip on the process, and allowing a more playful, imaginative lesson format. It has also involved being less rigid in the planning process.
Over this change, dance and maths became more intuitively and intrinsically linked.
Rebecca would now characterise her practice as
maths as a stimulus for dance rather than dance as a tool for teaching maths
For example:
In working with children on the concept of co-ordinates, the dance teaching started with a physical grid on the floor and rigid instruction on how to use the grid to move bodies according to defined co-ordinates.
Slowly the teaching moved to allowing children to experience the grid solely in their imaginations, allowing the size of the unit(or step taken) to be determined by them, and with the possibility of freeing it up even further by allowing the children to determine which co-ordinates they were going to move to, and where their (0,0) point was.
Over the year Rebecca has become less reliant on props (string, elastic bands, cardboard grids etc) and has used children's bodies and imaginations more, freeing them to concentrate on dance movements and concepts. At the same time she has used visual reinforcement (labelling children with numbers etc so they can represent that concept) and aural reinforcement (children chant the concepts/numbers/sums). This increases the ways that children have the concepts reinforced (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic).
Initially, classroom teaching of the concepts always preceded the dance teaching of them. Rebecca experimented with the idea of introducing the concept via dance, before it has been introduced in the classroom, but found that some explanation and discussion of concepts in the classroom preceding the dance session/s works better, because it enables pupils to concentrate on the dance activity, and because children find the prospect of a dance session is an incentive or reason for learning the concepts.
She would now like to develop further the idea of work in classrooms before the dance session (to familiarise with concepts) and follow-on work in the classroom after dance sessions (to reinforce the concepts).
For example:
In working with year 2 children on number bonds adding to 20, the teacher introduced the concept and taught the bonds before the dance sessions. However, the bonds had not fully stuck with children and they found the activity difficult (although they helped each other to do it, which was additional benefit). For the second session they had a strong incentive to learn their bonds so that they could do the dance session better. After the dance sessions, the teacher talked through with children what they had done, and the children frequently spontaneously referred to the dance sessions when going back to that subject area. There is potential for developing the pre- and post-session work further.
Rebecca has moved on over the year to getting her ideas more widely shared, both among teachers at her won school, Seagrave, doing shorter projects of two sessions each with six classes, and among other schools and artists, by running an INSET programme for artists and teachers from the William Sharp family of schools.
For example:
The INSET programme, 'Calculated Moves', was particularly successful in stimulating discussion, developing ideas and getting new forms of dance/maths activity and performance going in the family of schools. Teachers at Seagrave also said that having worked with Rebecca and their classes, they would be able and enthusiastic to extend and repeat her work themselves with their classes.
In both cases, more time spent on the activities would have ensured that the learning was sustained and acted upon.
Rebecca sees a strong link between dance and maths, both relying on elements such as pattern and rhythm. The elements shared are
Number/pattern/rhythm, Sequence, Shape and 3D spatial
Some areas of maths seem to be more easily amenable to dance treatment, particularly those with a shape or spatial aspect, or a pattern (e.g. triangles, co-ordinates). Topics such as place value are extremely abstract and so far, dance teaching of them has involved having to create new dance rules about how to interpret the concept with dance movements, making the process less instinctive.
Rebecca sees both performance-based work and workshop type sessions (where no final performance is intended) as being valuable in different ways to the learning of children:
freedom to play and experiment
no need to get it right
less rigidity in the activities
incentive to get it right
pride in achievement
more rigidity in the activities