The vision of ASCEND is to nurture a passion for learning and cultivate personal agency in order to discover who we are, what we need and how to advocate for it. Together, our community of students, families and staff explores, learns and grows through success and failure. Diverse learners thrive through an approach that develops the whole individual, which includes arts-integration, expeditionary learning, personalization, and a focus on social and emotional growth. Through a common vision guided by love, we empower each other to forge our own paths and to create a school that reflects the world we want.
ASCEND is an Expeditionary Learning school, which means our students take on an inquiry with guiding questions to study a topic deeply over many months. This content is integrated across subjects within their classrooms, and integrated with our Visual, Media, and Performing Arts programs. At the end of their learning expedition, student celebrate at our biannual Exposition of Learning.
Traditionally, arts integration takes place as a teaching collaboration between classroom and arts educators. Collaborative planning time is provided and lessons are "partner" taught, with teachers making connections between academic content and the arts disciplines. As the performing arts program is new to the school, music and dance are taught as a weekly special class (without the classroom teacher present). Despite this limitation, I was able to meet with the 2nd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers to begin a modest level of collaboration, without the "integration" class time.
In one of our 4/5 labs, students studied native and invasive species of Sausal Creek, a major part of our local watershed. We first studied the ways in which native plants moved and used the collected vocabulary to inspire movement creation. Students wrote cinquain poems and composed short dances to accompany them. Students also looked at change and power dynamics as a part of our unit on exploring weight, making connections between types of species and how they experienced invasion.
In second grade, students studied the life cycles of plants and insects. For performing arts integration, students learned two poems by Carol Gerber: "Seedlings," a poem about germinating seeds; and "New Baby," a poem about a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Our lessons began by reading the poem and identifying movement vocabulary that could guide creative exploration. We then looked at percussion instruments to investigate which sounds best matched the story and movements. Finally, students learned microphone technique and some elected to memorize and audition for the role of "poet" in our performance. See the final product in the video below:
Our 4th grade students have spent several weeks exploring the weight of their bodies in movement. We started with feeling our own weight lifting and falling back into the floor using various parts of the body.
As students became more comfortable with the weight of their own bodies, we explored sharing weight with a partner, creating shapes that would take us off balance, were it not for the return weight of our partner. Obviously, this kind of work requires a lot of trust, and our dancers quickly learned that they must be there for each other in order to be safe!
Next, we added a power dynamic between partners, where one student would be a "leader," and the other would have to follow. We varied the levels of resistance and speed and students reflected upon their emotions during the activity as both a leader and follower. In the closing circle, nearly all students said they would prefer to be the leader in the activity, if they had a choice. We talked about the implications of that preference in movement, and also in the world.
At the end of the unit, we added a prop to our weight explorations: a chair. For students, the chair is a daily tool that can have connotations of rigidity and boredom. It was so liberating to bring this piece of furniture into a movement context. It gave students a chance to reimagine its purpose and experiment with how to use it within their movement improvisations. Gratitude to Nia Womack-Freeman for her support in designing this unit.
Enjoy more of our weight explorations in the video below:
With Kodály's words in mind, I am taking a musicianship class at Holy Names University to continue my musical education. It is a challenging course, but the class size is small, so I have a lot of potential to grow! It has been helpful to be a student in the subject I'm teaching, to experience the same kinds of exercises at a much higher level. This helps me to have an eye on the long-term trajectory for my students in terms of what they could accomplish with continued support over years of study. Another reason for the course is that it keeps me connected to my local community of musicians and educators. Because this is a newly-created position at my school, I have no colleagues within the organization who are teaching what I do. This weekly connection in class gives me an outlet and sounding board that are important for sustainability in my new role!
"And I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies,
to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too.
It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody
to understand their works in twenty years' time."
~ Zoltan Kodály
It has been so fascinating to watch kindergarteners make sense of the material I give them. I have never taught students so young, and for most of them, this is their first year in a structured learning environment. We have spent much of our time practicing expectations during these first two months of school. Now that they are used to the Music and Dance room, I have begun to introduce content, such as vocalization practice.
The process of vocalization practice started with me leading "roller coaster" activities, where students would copy my voice and body as it went high or low in pitch. We then used our fingers to trace the paths of animals and cartoons with our fingers and voices. The activity below is our youngest students' first attempts to make their own paths using stick puppets and yarn "roads" for their characters (and voices!) to follow. I have much love and give credit to Janet Greene for inspiring this lesson.
This was very exciting to watch, as it is the beginnings of these young minds forming ideas about what it might look like to represent sound in a visual and physical way. I was able to catch a couple of brief moments on video, seen below.
For 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds who are new to movement, a creative dance class can be an intimidating and scary place. Because of this, I have seen many students cling to "dance moves" they already know, because they're more comfortable, or because they might deflect pressure by making others laugh. This can be a challenge when trying to establish an open, risk-taking creative community.
One of the strategies I've learned is to help these students get out of their heads and into their bodies as quickly as possible. I have not seen a faster way to do this than with the "Scarf Puppet" dance. One partner manipulates a scarf in different ways, and the other partner embodies the movements of the scarf, as if their partner is controlling them. This activity is widely used in the creative dance community, and the combination of copying an object and working with a partner to do so is usually very grounding for older beginners and alleviates fear within minutes.
I tried this work most recently with one of our fourth grade classes. At first, some students were still trying to use familiar dance moves (the Dab makes an appearance, then is modified), but they quickly found that there were many interesting new ways to make partners move, using the natural movements of a scarf in space. You can enjoy watching this evolution in the video below.
To me, on of the most mysterious skills in music is audiation, the ability to accurately hear music in your head. It can feel a bit nebulous as an instructor because, without a brain scan, you can't actually see the sense-making happening for students during practice. Luckily, music educators have been grappling with this for ages so I was able to borrow from their great work to get started.
One of the ways we have practiced audiation is by tapping the beat while "singing" a known song in our head, stopping the beat at the end of the song. This gives me a clear indication as to who is really following the song, and who is just tapping along, absent-mindedly.
Another activity we have tried is singing the song "Bingo" and practicing hiding letters from the pup's name and clapping instead of singing those letters. Many students are challenged and invigorated by this task! Some students are unable to silently sing the song in pieces, and continue to sing B-I-N-G-O with all letters. Others catch on to the rhythmic pattern, but then continue to say the letters, even through the end of the song.
These activities have helped me to better isolate the skill of audiation and differentiate instruction and support for them. Bingo has also made for a fun rhythm activity for our older students, mixing up different combinations of hidden letters. Our second graders love it!
