Flamenco Stomps Its Way Into Schools as English-Language Teaching Tool

Three schoolteachers, arms around each other’s shoulders and heads nearly touching, scurried on tiptoe across a dance studio, moving their hips to the rhythm of a recorded flamenco guitar. One woman’s particularly enthusiastic hip-swaying elicited an eruption of giggles from the circle of her all-female peers.The novice dancers were among 12 participants in a workshop at Lincoln Center that trains teachers to use flamenco dance to help students for whom English is not the native language communicate. Between last Wednesday and this Friday, the Lincoln Center Institute is offering dozens of such workshops in dance, music, theater, and visual arts to teachers who want to add flavor to their curricula.Yesterday morning, educators from kindergarten to college level gathered to watch a performance by a Hispanic-American dance company, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana. After lunch, the middle school and high school teachers who will be working with the company throughout the school year regrouped to explore how Flamenco dancing can be used as a tool to teach English.“We’re trying to get underneath what language is,” one of the teachers in the workshop, Latonya Borsay, said. “What are the bare minimum requirements to understand each other? How can we meet them where they are?” Ms. Borsay is one of three Lincoln Center teaching artists who in the last school year steered an educational program called Learning English and Drama.By emphasizing forms of communication besides speaking, such as body language and gesture, teachers hope to engage students who have been excluded from group activities by a language barrier.In flamenco dance, sound is made with a guitar, with the feet, with castanets, with the slapping of legs and chest, and, occasionally, with the voice. In the morning’s performance, the flamenco dancers communicated a passionately jealous love triangle without speaking a word.When the students see the performance live at their schools, it will help to “demystify English” for them, Ms. Borsay said, by showing them that speech is only one of many tools for communication.If the focus is on trying to speak English correctly, students tend to freeze up, she said. “When we put language back in its place, the apprehension goes away,” Ms. Borsay said.Participating in an artistic endeavor engages the students, she said, so that they stop thinking about whether their grammar is correct and start using their words to share their enthusiasm with classmates. A high school freshman in a class Ms. Borsay worked with this year, who was not comfortable speaking English in front of a group, suddenly began directing a scene of a play he thought his classmates were botching.“When language becomes a tool, my fear of speaking is taken over by my need to explain this to you,” an elementary school teacher at P.S. 153 in Queens, Kathleen Anderson, said. Ms. Anderson, who has used aesthetic teaching extensively in her classroom, said that when her students come back to visit her, it is the arts units they always remember.“Someone who has never said ‘boo’ will come out of himself in an arts unit. I’ve seen it again and again,” she said.“With the current educational edicts coming down from Mayor Bloomberg, there’s a lot of micromanagement – it’s a real cookie-cutter approach,” Ms. Anderson said. “We’re not creating little robots that read.”Ms. Anderson commended the Lincoln Center Institute workshops for helping teachers be creative in addressing the individual needs of their students. “All children learn in a different way,” she said. “You cannot script it.”

Flamenco Stomps Its Way Into Schools as English-Language Teaching Tool

Flamenco Stomps Its Way Into Schools as English-Language Teaching Tool

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