LEARNING NEW MOVES

Shealee Smith, left, and Shanitra Garrett danced in a line with other students at Washington Elementary School.

After a 30-minute dance lesson last week, fifth-graders Whitney Sibley and Steven Brandy said they had mastered the footwork in a new line dance.

"It was a lot of fun and it was easy today," said Whitney. "Dancing is always fun. And it keeps you from being clumsy."

Like other students in their gym class at Washington Elementary School, she and Steven learned how to "grapevine right" and turn left on the correct count.

"The hardest part was when we had to run forward and then walk backward," said Steven. "But it was really pretty easy."

Showing students, both college and elementary, that dancing can indeed be fun and easy was the goal of a workshop last week, the first of a series planned with a portion of the nearly half-million dollar grant to improve instruction in the fine arts.

Kaye and Don Anderson, professional ballroom dancers, were in town to teach the classes and to show off their own fancy footwork. Kaye Anderson is a dance professor at the University of California at Long Beach. She also has written eight textbooks on dance.

Anderson formerly taught dance at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.

Last week during workshops at Southeast, the Andersons talked with students about integrating dance education into all parts of the curriculum. Dance isn't just for gym class. In fact, the final project for student teachers was more like a reading comprehension project than a dance lesson. Students received written dance instructions, a glossary of terms, and were asked to figure out how the dance was supposed to be done.

"Even if you've never danced before, you can dance and you can teach dance," Kaye Anderson said. "I believe that if you can count, you can dance."

Dance, like many other forms of fine arts, has become something of a spectator sport. "Only the best do, the rest watch," she said.

Anderson thinks dance has the least classroom prestige of all areas of fine arts. About three-fourths of Missouri high schools have music education programs. Less than 10 percent of those schools have dance education programs.

But she would like to see that change.

Ann Cunningham, physical education teacher at Washington, danced with her students as they learned line dances from the Andersons last week. "This is not my area of expertise," she said. "I've learned a lot this week also."

While the curriculum calls for units in rhythm and dance, Cunningham said sometimes it's tough to teach those skills, especially to older children. She was pleased to have some new moves in her teaching repertoire.

"Dance is really enjoyable for everyone, if we can just get people to give it a try," Cunningham said.