Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Environmental Education Research
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
School
School of Education / Centre for People, Place and Planet / Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA)
RAS ID
35998
Funders
Edith Cowan University - Open Access Support Scheme 2021
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant, Canada
Abstract
This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning about weather as a separate phenomenon happening outside the classroom. Dance, as an intervention, helps to de-stabilise binary human-nature relations and reveals how children might come to understand their (human) selves as also weather bodies. New ways to understand humans’ entanglements with current weather events are also articulated, offering educators and researchers strategies for considering how the practice of dance improvisation might be integrated into early years education as an innovative approach to environmental learning.
DOI
10.1080/13504622.2021.1926434
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., & Rooney, T. (2021). Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years. Environmental Education Research, 27(8), 1141-1151. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2021.1926434