Dancing to Learn: The Brain's Cognition, Emotion, and Movement

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Dancing to Learn: Cognition, Emotion, and Movement explores the rationale for dance as a medium of learning to help engage educators and scientists to explore the underpinnings of dance, and dancers as well as members of the general public who are curious about new ways of comprehending dance. Among policy-makers, teachers, and parents, there is a heightened concern for successful pedagogical strategies. They want to know what can work with learners. This book approaches the subject of learning in, about, and through dance by triangulating knowledge from the arts and humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and cognitive and neurological sciences to challenge dismissive views of the cognitive importance of the physical dance. Insights come from theories and research findings in aesthetics, anthropology, cognitive science, dance, education, feminist theory, linguistics, neuroscience, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology. Using a single theory puts blinders on to other ways of description and analysis. Of course, all knowledge is tentative. Experiments necessarily must focus on a narrow topic and often use a special demographicuniversity students, and we dont know the representativeness of case studies.

Reviews

Dancing to Learn does not provide all the answers about the impact of dance on the brain but it does provide more than enough evidence to proudly refute any outdated, biased, and misinformed claim that dance is irrelevant to cognition and education.Dancing to Learn: The Brains Cognition, Emotion, and Movement encourages us to find our way back to what first drew many of us to this professionthe healing inherent in dance. * American Journal of Dance Therapy *
Hannas review of the extant literature on the neurological impacts of dance specifically and exercise more broadly is wide reaching. [T]he range of material she draws on may be very persuasive to her imagined reader, skeptical about the importance of dance in education. The many examples that Hanna reviews of dance education programs are one of the most valuable resources in the book, and a reader interested in examples of dance-integrated learning will find leads on exciting pilots and thriving dance programs. [The] case studies are quite rich and fascinating. On the whole, the work is wide and fast moving, a strong model of one way that comparative cross-cultural anthropology integrating neuroscience and cultural research can be deployed in educational activism. * American Anthropologist *
The research for the hypothesis undertaken by Dr. Hanna and all others involved, is impressive. . . .The author's style is academic with an excellent fifteen pages of reference works and a clear and precise index. I thank the author for giving me a new insight into an art form I very much enjoy. * ImagineMag!: A South African Arts & Culture Magazine *
Dancing is a powerful human actperhaps no other human endeavor so thoroughly integrates our capacities for movement, artistic expression, social communication, meaning-making and emotional feeling. Dancing to Learn explains why this is so, and in the process teaches readers how to utilize dance to promote human development and social change...A great read for anyone interested in embodiment, culture and learning, whether or not they dance. -- Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. PhD. Associate Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute and Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California
Judith Lynne Hanna is a tireless champion of the body, dance and its ability to touch our pleasure spots and panic buttons. She has given us this new treatise, an elegant and magisterial synthesis that should finally put to rest any doubt that dance is essential to a cultivated, emotionally and spiritually balanced and brave contemporary society the one we are always seeking to become! -- Bill T. Jones. Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer New York Life Arts and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, writer, educator, awards winner, and honorary doctorates
The potential of dance to foster deep thinking and learning is especially potent. providing nonverbal language mechanisms as important to learning as verbal language. Judith Lynne Hanna takes the idea of dance to promote learning to new levels with Dancing to Learn: The Brains Cognition, Emotion, and Movement. Recent findings from the brain sciences suggest that dance promotesthe growth of new brain cells and vital skills for learning including attention, memory, and cognitive flexibility. Hanna provides numerous examples of how dance education programs and dance-integrated strategies in non-dance subjects can enrich students educational experiences in formal and informal settings. -- Mariale M. Hardiman. EdD Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Education; Author of Brain-Targeted Teaching for 21st Century Schools
Dancing to Learn is pioneering, situating us in current neuroscience and other disciplinary research related to dance, demonstrating the orienting and mobilizing power of dance, and suggesting several possible pathways forward for the benefit of every learner and society as a whole. Dr. Hanna's work is a challenging and thoughtful examination of the educational importance of one of humankind's oldest and most unifying practices, and should be read by parents, educators, policy-makers, dance-skeptics, and dancers alike. -- Blake Martin, PhD, teacher in York Universitys Dance Department; scientist at Accelerated Learning and Retention Project, DRDC

Author Bio

Judith Hanna earneda Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, an M.A. in political science from Michigan State University, and a B.A. in political science from UCLA. She is an Affiliate Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, an educator, writer and dance critic.