 🇸🇪 Summary in SwedishÂ
Maria Edin
Stockholm University of the Arts
This article recounts how eleven primary school teachers experience the value of dance lessons, led by a dance teacher from Sigtuna Kulturskola, in primary school grades two and three. The teachers have participated together with their students in dance lessons, once a week, for forty minutes during two grades.
A master’s thesis, on which this article is based, aims to contribute to knowledge about dance in school. Through two research questions, the answers to the following are sought: What do a number of primary school teachers interviewed think about dance in school? And: In what way can teachers’ thoughts about dance say something about dance as an aesthetic learning process in elementary school? The work is done with narrative research as a methodological approach.
The teachers were given seven conversation topics at seven stations to share their thoughts on knowledge acquisition, language development, personal development, social observations, gender, creation, and other things, where the teachers could bring up something on their own initiative. The teachers agreed that aesthetic learning processes strengthen both the class as a whole and the student on a personal level. The students get tools to be creative both individually and in groups. Dancing in school helps students acquire the knowledge that the school wants to convey, also linguistically.
Parallel to the teachers’ stories, there is a review of aesthetic learning processes through various authors’ texts on the subject. The aesthetic learning process has a holistic approach and its inherent rhizomatic nature gives students the opportunity to both experience, create and develop in the same situation. The conclusion is that dance in school is a good tool to use in students’ education, which also promotes both health and well-being in students.
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MARIA EDIN is a certified dance teacher working in Sigtuna Kulturskola. For many years she has been teaching dance in the municipality’s various schools, in the lower grades. In her master’s thesis, she addresses aesthetic learning processes in general and specifically in dance. The essay also contains the stories of eleven different elementary school teachers about how they experience dance teaching together with their students. Maria is a strong advocate of dance in school and she believes that dance, in a creative tradition, should be a natural part of all students’ education.
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