Personal Statement / Anthony Roberts
A summer dare from my sister propelled me into the arts. I was twenty-something, enrolled in my hometown university, and becoming increasingly desperate in not finding a career path. I had not yet realized that I was really in search of a career calling, a vocation. Prior to that time, I cannot recall a meaningful exposure to the arts. I was a first generation college student, and my father's desired career choice for me was based solely upon financial stability. My intuition, however, told me I was destined to follow another path, without a clue what that might be. Thanks to persistence and patience, I eventually discovered dance and without understanding why, I dove in. Almost a decade after accepting my sister’s dare and with a lot of hard work, sacrifice, fortunate opportunities and thoughtful mentors along the way, I was a full-time professional dancer in a modern dance company based almost 2,000 miles from where my journey began. My path was challenging and complicated on many levels, but it was also extremely rewarding. When I had been dancing professionally for about two years, I paused when the epiphany that I really was a dance artist finally hit me. Dance, as a career, was not a conscious choice for me, but one that I was compelled to pursue. I am in my 18th year as a dance educator and artist at St. Olaf College, a liberal arts institution where the mission is to encourage the development of the whole person in mind, body and spirit. Referencing the St. Olaf College Department of Dance’s mission and overview statements, of which I am coauthor, I am committed to teaching and presenting dance as a vital form of embodied awareness and understanding, communication and expression, and I help guide students toward lives and careers with strong physical, creative, and analytical skills at their foundation, which in the context of a liberal arts college experience prepares students for a wide range of life and career possibilities and options. Contributions To Student Learning And Development: Thinking back to 1994, when I was a dancer making the transition from the professional world to teaching in a liberal arts college, I felt as though I was relying upon the subconscious osmosis of informal pedagogical theory from my studies with a multitude of dance teachers over the years. Teaching seemed daunting. Why did some classes seem effective, while others fell flat? The answer to this question continues to be a work in process, but it most certainly lies in exploring correlations between current brain research, multiple intelligences, theories of pedagogy and learning to adapt these ideas to the teaching of artistic movement theory, technique, creation and performance. I have come to believe a successful learning situation is a communal journey in which students and instructor are encouraged to engage and collaborate on the experimentation, exchange, and transformation of ideas, information, and experiences in the learning community. This type of learning journey requires a high degree of commitment, trust and participation from each participant, but I believe it leads to substantive growth, a high degree of competence, understanding, reward, and satisfaction on the part of both students and instructor. The explicit goals I have for my students in my movement intensive classes and the skills they should learn are the same: as a result of taking my movement intensive classes, students should have developed a cognitive understanding and demonstrated kinetic practice of aligning and moving their bodies more articulately and with intention through a range of space, time and energy dimensions, in essence honing their artistic physical intelligences. An implicit goal is to have students willingly participate in and contribute toward sustaining the learning situation described above. In striving to achieve course goals in my movement intensive courses, I design class activities that employ active and passive learning strategies in a wide range of teaching methods including instructor demonstration, audio/visual, individual and group practice, peer teaching and review. Below are two examples of course assignments that utilize a range of student centered, active learning opportunities.
Student understanding in my movement intensive courses is primarily assessed through ongoing live and video observation of student performance of course concepts and material. A percentage scale is distributed among the following categories, with a slight variance in percentage weight per category between level one and level two courses: Demonstrated Quality of Effort, Demonstrated Growth, Demonstrated Level of Ability. As these courses require a high degree of in class participation in order for students to effectively learn, grow and succeed, course attendance is expected, recorded and has an impact upon the student’s assessment. In advising and mentoring my students, I work to connect and empathize with each student’s unique journey, keeping in mind my own circuitous and unlikely path in finding, following, and sustaining my career passion. As an advisor and instructor, there is no greater pleasure than witnessing the tangible transformation that occurs in the moment when a student discovers their academic passion, embodies a difficult concept, or finds their career calling. I am truly committed to helping students achieve these transformations. An important change in my teaching actually originated during the process of choreographing concert dance pieces on my students in the late 1990s. At that time, I created, refined, and sequenced all the movement material for a new piece on my body before teaching the movements to the dancers. The method of creating movement in one’s own body, based upon the unique and creative proclivities and physical facilities of an individual dance artist, has contributed to the ongoing development of the rich lexicon of modern dance movement techniques throughout the history of modern dance (Graham, Humphrey, Horton, Cunningham, for example). These dance techniques have also served as a springboard for new artists to imagine fresh perspectives in creating movement. In my previous choreographic process, after the dancers had learned the movement I created, I made compositional adaptations to the movement and coached the dancers on their performance of the material to create the finished dance. In essence, the dancers were important in embodying and translating my vision for the piece, not theirs. There is a correlation in this method of creating dance to the passive learning strategies prevalent in traditional language-intensive pedagogy paradigms. Dance students began to express a desire to play a more active role in the creative process, to be collaborators, co-creators. I began a shift from having sole responsibility for the creation of a piece to sharing responsibility with the student dancers. This shift inspired a similar evolution in my teaching from an emphasis on me teaching to the students to teaching with the students and encouraging teaching by the students. I have not abandoned the process of creating movement in my own body and teaching it to the dancers in either the choreographic or teaching environments, because I believe acquiring the skill and ability to learn and embody another dance artist's movement in one’s own body is equally important to learning and considering another scholar’s cognitive perspective and ideas in the process of developing one’s own point of view and making meaning of the world. However, the establishment of a creative community in the choreographic process has had a positive impact upon my approach to teaching in a learning community. I am committed to encouraging students to explore the use of new technologies in their dance studies. This interest began in the late 1990s by taking a computer generated dance workshop at The Ohio State University. This initial experience led to other workshops, courses, and presentations; post-graduate work in 2001-2002; and the design of a St. Olaf College dance major course integrating dance and digital technology. In 2010, I received funding for an undergraduate student research project through St. Olaf College’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) program. The research project focused on the design of a distance-learning dance education and performance environment, which resulted in a long-distance teaching opportunity for St. Olaf dance majors as they taught movement to conference faculty participants attending the Association of Lutheran College Faculties Annual Meeting “Crossings and Crossroads,” on the campus of Concordia University, Irvine (St. Olaf College article: How to dance 1,500 miles in seconds). The process of integrating digital technologies and dance is challenging, and it can be seen as diametrically opposed to the primary goal of developing the body in deepening students' physical intelligences. I find that St. Olaf dance major students are typically reticent to embrace the meaningful integration of digital technologies into their body-based learning environments. In fact, a 2011 CURI summer research project proposal focusing on pedagogical processes for teaching dance and film via 3D character animation received no dance major interest and was not implemented. Admittedly, many of my previous experiences attempting the integration of dance and technology were so completely preoccupied with the technological issues (expense, learning curve, space requirement, setup, testing and troubleshooting) that very little, if any, meaningful time or consideration were given to the actual movement aspects of the process. So, I understand the hesitancy of the students to move forward in creating technologically mediated dance. It has been my experience that the effective use of technology requires an intentional investment of resources, time, planning, exploration, persistence on the part of students, faculty and the College. I will continue to provide dance students with the opportunity to meaningfully utilize and integrate new technologies into their rich body-based education, as I believe it will give them with an edge in their future journeys as artists and in other career paths. Contributions To One’s Scholarly Or Artistic Field(s):
My professional affiliations include current or recent membership in the following organizations: Dance Camera West, 2011; National Dance Education Organization (NDEO), 2006-present; Dance Educators Coalition of Minnesota (DEC), 2006-present. Periodically, I attend the American College Dance Festival Association (ACDFA): St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, March 2011; University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, March 2010. Contributions Of Service And Leadership Within And Beyond The Institution: Future Considerations:
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