Essential Community Members
Recently I had the great joy and honor of taking a dance class with my college professor,?Julie Adams Strandberg. It was not just any class; it was Julie’s final class at Brown University, where she started the dance program in 1969, and where, at the glorious age of 80, she has just retired from full-time teaching.?
Throughout her 50+ year career, Julie has challenged the notion that dance is the purview of an elite group of trained professionals. She is an award-winning dancer and choreographer and has taught, and danced alongside, countless professional dancers. However, Julie is just as proud of the middle and high schoolers; children on the autism spectrum; and elders with Parkinson’s Disease whom she counts among her students. And Julie often brings together this diverse array of intergenerational dancers to?study and perform in the same classroom and on the same stage.?
Julie insists, “It’s not a question of who gets to dance. Dancers get to dance!” (Watch?a short video excerpt of our conversation?here.)
And by looking at everyone as a potential dancer, Julie has learned valuable lessons that apply to all of us who are teachers.
Julie explains, “Dancing is always about limitations. Every dancer, including Baryshnikov…has a strength, and they have something that they have to keep working on.” In speaking about the elders with Parkinson’s whom Julie teaches, she says, “If you teach them as if they’re dancers, then you’re not teaching them about what they can’t do, you’re teaching them about what they can do…If you feel like you are focusing on what you can do, it’s a whole different mindset.”
Before joining Brown’s faculty, Julie was an elementary school teacher. When I asked her how she’d advise teachers today on supporting students who struggle to focus and concentrate in school, she replied: “The body has to move before it can sit down and concentrate.”?She recommends sending students outside where possible or giving them indoor tasks that involve moving their bodies, in order to “wake up their nervous system” before asking them to sit and focus. (And of course, Julie points out that focus can and does happen when a body is in motion too!)?
Julie’s teaching approach embraces?asset framing, which?I’ve written about?as a mindset we should all understand as we strive to support our students. Her approach also emphasizes belonging, one of Inspired Teaching’s?ABCDE’s of Learner Needs. Julie says that the community-building power of dance can combat the “sense of isolation and loneliness” that elders with Parkinson’s often experience, and that so many of our students have experienced during these past few years. “Once you’re a part of a repertory or a dance, then you are an essential part of a community that is relying on you to tell a story,” she says.
Julie points out, “You learn things from people with special needs that apply to all people.”
Though Julie has retired from her full-time faculty position, she continues teaching and advocating for access to dance through the many nonprofit organizations she has founded over the years.?
As we look toward summertime, with the opportunities it offers to reflect on our practice,?how might we see our students differently - as dancers, mathematicians, historians - and most importantly, as essential parts of our learning community??
For more resources, visit the issue on our website: https://inspiredteaching.org/essential-community-members
Listen to this issue and past Hooray For Monday episodes: https://soundcloud.com/inspiredteaching