What Can Dance Teach Us About Learning? — From the Dana Foundation


Here comes another piece on arts education and the brain, from The Dana Foundation’s Cerebrum Magazine.

I have to say, I love this stream of pieces that is being generated by Dana. This piece, What Dance Can Teach Us About Learning?highlights the
importance of including physical learning in the classroom, to
stimulate creativity, increase motivation and bolster social
intelligence.

The AON experiments provide
glimpses into a brain system that is exquisitely tuned to learn and to
understand physical knowledge. Such insights from cognitive
neuroscience help to identify learning principles important to
education policy and practices; they form the very basis of the new
(and growing) academic field of neuroeducation. Our society places
great emphasis on academic success within a narrow set of areas (math,
reading or higher IQ). This makes it tempting to apply a narrow
translational framework whereby the value of dance, music and other
physical arts depends only on the degree to which these pursuits make a
student more successful in the desirable academic areas.

BrainInJar.jpg