Arts-based pedagogies have become popular in environmental education (EE) to enhance students' experience and develop interdisciplinary leaders and thinkers for climate change issues. Dance improvisation offers an opportunity for students to blur the human-nature delineation through body movement to understand the relationship of environmental changes on humans and human action on environments. In particular, dance improvisation may help young students embody weather and discover that weather actively happens all the time, not just when the student is outside experiencing the weather. In this study, the researchers observed two dance improvisation sessions that focused on breathing and weather-making, or moving in ways that mimic weather, to demonstrate the way dance could impact preschoolers' conceptualizations of weather.
This study took place over the 2018-2019 school year in Ngunnawal Country, Canberra, Australia. One researcher administered the dance improvisation sessions over two days for 30 preschoolers and 5 teachers, split into 2 groups. The first session, "collaborative clouding,” required the students to use breathing to mimic and experience weather within and outside of their bodies. The experience was built from the facilitator prompting the students to feel their tummies and head and describe the weather inside those areas (i.e., "stormy,” or "cloudy”). Then the researcher had the students breathe and move their breath to their fingertips using their imagination. Then they imagined the weather and scooped the air up with their hands and arms, describing their thoughts. The second session, "material skies,” started with an auditory experience in which tissue paper was crumbled to resemble rain. Then, the students were encouraged to make their own storm by crumpling their papers and soaking the paper in a nearby lake. The students squished their papers on the ground and watched the water flow out "from the cloud.” These body movements were a form of dance in the two sessions, and each were compiled into stories that the researchers included in this article.
The researchers concluded these sessions demonstrated ways dance improvisation and body movement can be incorporated into early childhood EE to develop a student's sense of self and connection to the natural world. The collaborative clouding exercise showed breath and weather are inseparable in that breath is always happening yet invisible much like the weather patterns of wind and pressure changes. Further, the students could feel what weather may be like when breathing in, establishing a connection between their bodies and the weather. The materials skies session helped the students visualize the process of weather making by creating their own storms through auditory and tactile exercises such as squeezing the soaked tissue paper and spinning and dancing around.
There were limitations to this study, and the results were not generalizable. The researchers did not use an experimental group and a control group to compare the results of the dance interventions when teaching the students about weather. There was also no discussion of follow-up mechanisms that measured the retention of weather knowledge in students and how the experience of removing the human-nature boundary during dance improvisation exercises stayed with the students over time.
The researchers recommended early childhood environmental educators consider implementing dance improvisation as a means to introduce young students to the relationships of humans and weather. Particularly in classroom settings or in settings where accessing nature is difficult, dance improvisation can help connect students with weather.
The Bottom Line
Dance improvisation offers an opportunity for students to blur the human-nature delineation to understand the relationship of environmental changes on humans and human action on environments. The researchers observed two dance improvisation sessions that focused on breathing and weather-making to demonstrate the way dance could impact preschoolers' conceptualization of and connection to weather. "Collaborative clouding” showed breath and weather are inseparable in that breath is always happening yet invisible much like the weather patterns of wind and pressure changes. "Materials skies” helped the students visualize the process of weather making by creating their own storms through dance. The researchers recommended early childhood environmental educators implement dance improvisation as a means to introduce young students to the relationships of humans and weather.
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