Teacher Study Guides

Dance education begins with awareness of the body and its creative potential. But understanding dance also includes experiences in perceiving, responding, viewing, and thinking critically about dance. This includes introducing students to historical, cultural, folkloric, and traditional experiences. This can be both a personal and a social experience. Teacher Study Guides are meant to be a resource for classroom teachers, students, and others to further explore dance.

Dance is an art that uses non-verbal movement in an extraordinary way to create form, order, or a statement. Learning about dance can mean exploring different societies and periods of history and recognizing and respecting dance contributions from various cultures.

Through participation in the arts, students not only develop their creative and cognitive capacities, but also cross barriers of class, race, language, and culture. The arts also represent different ways of knowing and multiple forms of intelligence. Your imagination and ideas are the most important resource. Creative and imaginative individuals move the world forward, change it and bring improvement. We believe all students deserve access to the rich education and understanding that the arts provide, regardless of their background, talent, or abilities.

These Teacher Study Guides will assist you in exploring the vast world of dance, movement, and creativity.

2008 Season Study Guides

West Side Story Suite (852KB PDF)

Filling Station and Drink to Me With Thine Eyes (4.8MB PDF)

Nutcracker Study Guide

Nutcracker (2.3MB PDF)

2007 Season Study Guides

Firebird (1.5MB PDF)

Carousel (A Dance)^© (1.4MB PDF)