Teaching Philosophy

 I am always seeking ways of including interdisciplinary learning opportunities into my teaching. This value was instilled in me as a student at Muhlenberg with my double major in psychology, as I was always encouraged to fuse my research interests across both areas of study, and it was also instilled in me at one of my first jobs I had after graduating college as a dance and theatre faculty at Buck’s Rock Performing and Creative Arts camp. The Montessori style sleep- away camp, located in the middle of the woods in Connecticut, hosts artists of numerous visual and performing arts mediums each summer, and encourages cross-discipline collaboration and freedom of choice.

 

Some of the ways I implement interdisciplinary learning opportunities in the classroom include experiential projects and assignments, local field trips to museums and parks, and collaborations with other departments on campus. I have taken modern dance students to a local art museum to study and embody different textures and themes present in the exhibits. I created a dance film as a class assignment for a group of students that was submitted and accepted to the Global Water Dance film festival in 2021. I took a group of tap dance students to collaborate with jazz music ensembles. I set up an experiential fieldwork component for my dance pedagogy students, where they taught dance in local public schools. 

I constantly assess my pedagogy to ensure that it is culturally relevant for my students each semester in the way I approach course structure and content. Recognizing that students entering my classroom already have a wealth of prior knowledge gleaned from entirely different educational experiences and cultural backgrounds, it is my intention to meet each student at the level they enter, learn from them, and work to raise them to an even higher potential. I do not impose my own voice on students’ work, but rather encourage them to discover and deepen their own creative voices.

 

I provide ways for students to see themselves and their cultures represented through readings, class discussion, viewings, and research projects. I compel students think critically about issues of representation, diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field of dance. This is a process that is active and ongoing, and works hand in hand with promoting antiracism. It challenges me as an educator to continue learning from my students and the field of dance as it grows and changes. I believe dancers in higher education should not only study the lineage of the forms they embody most often, but should also be made aware of the issues of representation and inclusion in dance classrooms.

I work to establish a strong interpersonal classroom culture of positivity and safety. Every class I teach is a community: a unique cross-section of students from different cultures, experiences, and skill levels. As someone who experienced classrooms that did not always establish a sense of community and felt intimidated and sometimes excluded in dance classes, I employ a number of strategies to foster a spirit of community.

 

I encourage students to cheer on their classmates and “hype them up”, when dancing in small groups and part of the class is waiting for their turn. I encourage “lab moments” where students work with a peer to practice a concept, give each other positive and constructive feedback, or try a challenging variation, and I provide different levels of difficulty and variations to all students. I encourage civil discourse, mandate mutual respect among the students and myself, and offer positive reinforcement with constructive feedback equitably to all members of the class community. Most importantly, I encourage dancers to preserve and celebrate their personal movement style and apply it to their dancing.

I believe a great dance class is one that is physically rigorous, mentally stimulating, and allows for growth through different levels of challenge. I provide ways for students to challenge themselves with variations of movement patterns, skills that increase in difficulty, and different ways of patterning movement. 

​

I also take a student-centered approach to coursework, allowing students to develop research based upon their own interests in the course content. When I teach dance history, I have students work with peers to devise choreographic concepts that are grounded in scholarly research. My course is arranged in thematic modules, and students select a subtopic that relates to one module, choosing a reading from the course and finding a peer-reviewed outside source to support and inform their concept. The project culminates with a presentation where students demonstrate choreography or movement ideas, and explain how they would stage the work. They write papres that situate their choreography with the scholarly research they used to develop their concepts. Several of my students have used this assignment as a basis for their capstone and thesis productions.

 

I have been honored to mentor numerous dance students throughout the process of their thesis and capstone productions by attending rehearsals and showings, offering feedback, and providing mentorship in collaborating with designers. In my own choreographic processes, I am very collaborative and often invite the dancers I work with to help shape the work I create through guided prompts to help them delve into personal experiences that may inform the work. This is my way of giving performers agency and a point of entry into the work, in addition to creating a passionate, meaningful, and  collaborative environment.  

 

I teach dancers in technique classes to “dance from the inside out,” meaning that they are not simply mimicking movement they are visually perceiving, but are somatic in their engagement of the material and making connections as they learn kinesthetically and experientially. Sometimes this means finding a new understanding for students who may not have learned in this way before. 

 

I find that by giving somatic approaches to understand movements, it allows students to find deeper connections with their bodies, more awareness of rhythm and musicality in their dancing, and a dynamic alignment that works with their bodies, rather than against. While I guide these moments of self-awareness for more novice dancers, I have intermediate and advanced dancers assess themselves in an effort to further develop their bodily awareness and somatic sensitivity by assigning reflective self-assessment papers with guiding questions and prompts.