Barbara Snook

Artists in Schools: “Kick Starting” or “Kicking Out” Dance from New Zealand Classrooms

Abstract New Zealand primary school teachers have access to a comprehensive arts curriculum that includes dance, drama, music, and visual arts. This research focused on several teachers’ reality of implementing the dance curriculum in New Zealand primary schools, drawing on Snooks (2012) study in this field. Our research valued the voices of teachers, principals, and parents. We found that the primary school teachers in this study lacked experience in teaching dance, manifesting as a lack of confidence to teach dance in their classrooms. The teachers spoke to the practice of bringing in dance experts to kick start, support, develop, and mentor dance programs in their schools. A surprising, yet clear finding from our study was that a teachers preexisting lack of confidence in teaching dance might be compounded by the visit of an expert. This statement raises several issues regarding artists in schools programs in New Zealand that are examined in this article.

Policy and Practice within Arts Education: Rhetoric and Reality.

This paper reflects upon international arts education action and relative local in-action. The first half of the paper provides a brief narrative of the World Alliance for Arts Education’s advocacy work and the development of the UNESCO Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education. The second half of the paper highlights a dance education research project in New Zealand that relates to strategies and actions noted within the Seoul Agenda. This dance education research reveals both the power and impotence of policies and events such as the Seoul Agenda and International Arts Education Week. The research reveals that when you step off the global stage and turn to your own backyard, reality strikes hard. Arts education is valued, yet relatively few teachers, fewer schools and even fewer governments are actually willing to fully realise the potential of arts education. Arts education for all the rhetoric lacks commitment and investment. Using dance education as a lens, this research examines what teachers in New Zealand are doing in their classrooms and what this means for local communities, teachers, schools, teacher education institutions, advocacy and support organisations, then provides suggestions so that dance and other arts can fulfil their potential.

The Transformative Potential of Community Dance for People With Cancer

This research describes a community dance project for people affected by cancer, which was led by a trained community dancer over 10 movement workshops and three performances. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the research explored the experiences of a convenience sample of 8 participants out of the original group of 17 individuals who took part in the community dance. The research was participatory and the researchers were involved in workshops and performances as members of the group who also had family members with cancer. The findings indicate the motivation of the dancers to continue in spite of hardship, their sense of pride in being part of something that was larger than themselves, the way the dance permitted them to embody a sense of courage, and finally, in performing, how they managed to share something that genuinely moved an audience.

Negotiating meanings and examining practice of ‘arts across the curriculum’

Abstract Examining practice, within education, is complex and never straightforward. It is not a surprise that when we conduct research, we discover new and contrary meanings. For the last 16 months we have been examining different means for supporting teaching and learning of the arts in primary schools. Our aim was to better understand how to teach the arts across the curriculum. We made a plan, we gained ethical approval, found several schools to work with, and interviewed teachers and principals. Our research has a specific interest in documenting and understanding how the arts are taught across the curriculum. We were most interested in working with teachers, principals and children who were implementing an ‘arts across the curriculum programme’. In short, what we found was that teachers, principals, curriculum and us, all had different meanings of what was meant by teaching the arts across the curriculum.