Faculty: Gill Wright Miller, Department of Dance
Librarian: Ann Watson, Department of Dance
Introduction
I would like to apply for a Mellon Foundation Grant to promote Information Literacy for a series of courses in the Dance Department at Denison University. The grant would be used to develop, first, our two-year old "Cultural Studies in Dance" course offered each Fall, and, second, to allow that course to serve as the foundation for the "Junior Research and Methodology" course now being developed to be offered for the first time in the Spring. We propose these two steps will increase our expectations for the Senior Research component currently required of all majors and minors. The Department's long-range plan, then, includes taking this information into the technique classes (contemporary, ballet, and world dance) for particular application to mini-projects already required there. It is our hope that technology will "infiltrate" our methods for research in dance at all levels and in all courses.
Background
We find here at Denison that dance students need to strengthen their information research skills. It is beyond the scope of this proposal to speculate why this is so. It may be that the kinds of students that are attracted to a liberal arts dance major (rather than to a conservatory education or to a non-university education) hope to experience non-traditional challenges rather than traditional library research. It may be that the kinds of research traditionally carried on in dance itself is physical, experiential, and personal; and these kinds of explorations do not seem to be well suited to information technology. Regardless of the reasons, we believe students should not emerge from a liberal arts college unprepared in the ways of technology, and that the fact of one major over another should not determine who can and who cannot compete in the current ways of the well-educated research world.
I believe as well that the more recent surge into technology we have all experiences encourages disparate ways of researching (philosophical, sociological, experiential, etc.) to merge. As the website for this grant details, "the World Wide Web, advances in electronic database technology, and the availability through high-speed networks of a variety of full-text electronic resources have dramatically increased available resources and the complexity of library research." This makes research (both sites and reports) previously unavailable to dance students in Granville Ohio now readily available. What the website does not explicitly say is that this kind of interactive research appeals to the kinds of intelligences (see Howard Gardner) that dance students value. The new technology provides for a physical, experiential and personal version of research because it encourages a hands-on approach (somewhat akin to computer games) by experimenting with twists and turns to the research (somewhat akin to working through a maze) and requiring a multi-dimensional (indeed, "webbed") pathway from question to solution which s, by definition, incredibly complex and personal.
I also concur, "this new electronic environment offers access to an overwhelming array of materials, yet little guidance about how to find, evaluate, and use relevant information." Our training as dance artists and dance theorists did not include this kind of work - perhaps because we have been out of formal schooling for so long, perhaps because the kinds of materials we seek were not previously downloaded to technological sources, or perhaps because the disciplines themselves have altered and adjusted, blurring boundaries between one disciplines and the next. When I was first schooled in dance history (undergraduate school, 1970-1974), my coursework covered only European ballet in the 19th century and then American modern dance in the 20th century. In graduate school as well, the concept of diversity did not reach dance studies; we were required to know only mainstage European ballet and American concert dance (ballet and modern.)
By the mid-1980s, a new kind of research was emerging called "cultural studies" that permitted non-Western dance to be the subject (and object) of American dance scholarship. As Jane Desmond says, where we were once trying to articulate aesthetic categories, describe ephemeral forms, or provide historical contexts, we are now trying to investigate operations of social power. The past fifteen years have seen an enormous amount of intercultural, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary research evolve, and technology has made that work available to all of us who seek it.
Currently, dance scholarship has opened so wide that we consider not only non-Western dance, but also non-concert forms. The course that I am working on revising now promises to address dance as a cultural phenomenon, rather than (simply) an aesthetic statement with little accountability due to it temporary nature. We will also consider disco, raves, line and square dances, clogging, and other forms that are representative of "many people dancing" - reflecting my belief that "everyone dances" in one way or another.
The Proposal
I seek support in developing a technologically-enhanced curriculum in dance research, working in collaboration with librarian Ann Watson and integrating information literacy skills incrementally through three courses: (1) Cultural Studies in Dance: Beyond Traditional Boundaries, (2) Junior Research and Methodology in Dance, and (3) Senior Research. This grant will focus on the first two courses with an eye toward the third.
The Dance major requirements divide into three kinds of inquiries: practical, theoretical, and integrative. Generally speaking, these areas of inquiry include (1) technique or the physical training of the body, (2) the academic/analytical training that problematizes the human body's capacity to accommodate physical requests, and the researcher's capacity to record, interpreted, and create meaning from movement (for both the do-er and the observer), and finally (3) advanced experiences that draw on the merged space of practical and theoretical work. Now that dance departments are squarely in the midst of academic institutions, the discipline (and indeed the department here) recognizes a desire for our students to do more sophisticated research activity using traditionally respected aesthetic/philosophical, kinesiological, and sociological epistemologies. However, we feel making this demand of our senior researchers without the concomitant foundation would be foolhardy. Through many discussions over the past three years, the Dance department has agreed the place to begin is with the sophomore-level introduction to dance as a cultural practice, and then carry those skills into a just-now developing "Junior Research and Methodology Seminar" that aims at preparing the prospectus for a "Senior Research semester- or year-long activity. The three courses addressed in this grant proposal are sequenced (sophomore level, junior level, senior level), and are all required of our majors.
The Dance Department currently employs two full-time and three part-time faculty. The other full-time faculty (Sandy Mathern-Smith) is intimately involved with technology in performance ways, so this research endeavor would not only complement her work, but also illustrate to students that technology is at their disposal in a variety of ways. Our World Dance colleague this year (Rohini Dandevante) used the electronic classroom every class day, teaching us all the full value of CD-ROMs. Part-time faculty members Robert Cole and Claudia Howard Queen also use technology in many ways, especially through the music and lighting components of dance's performing arm. Finally, senior Jessica Ray '01 focused her Senior Research Honors Project in I-movie and videodance, while colleague Jennifer Malaquias '01 focused hers on power point presentations as set design for performance. We have much to learn from each other.
We also anticipate this pilot project for the course "Cultural Studies in Dance: Beyond Traditional Boundaries" and its sequels, "Junior Research ? Seminar" and "Senior Research," might provide an opportunity for Ann and me, as the Guidelines suggest, "to create a faculty-librarian workshop to demonstrate effective approaches to teaching information literacy and to encourage further development and collaboration within our department, and perhaps within the Five Colleges Consortium."
We are fully aware that Denison's Dance Department is one of the strongest in the GLCA and our "mid-west aspirant" group that President Dale Knobel has identified. We find ourselves squarely within the top three colleges, competing hardily with Oberlin and Hope, each of whom has far more faculty than we have. It seems more than reasonable to presume we might create a workshop for our Five College Consortium, and then perhaps for others within GLCA.
The course "Cultural Studies in Dance: Beyond Traditional Boundaries" (hereafter referred to as "Cultural Studies") is the course that "satisfies" an inquiry into dance's history. As I mentioned earlier, this kind of course at various universities across the country used to be the historical study of the inception of ballet (in the 16th century), a rush to the Romantic Era and story-ballets, and finally a jump-shift to American concert dance beginning with the pre-Moderns of Duncan and St. Denis and the Moderns of Graham, Humphrey, and Weidman. As the century progresses, we had too much to cover, so history teachers broke the courses into two semesters, with "early dance history" meaning everything until 1910, and 20th Century history covering pre-Moderns through post-Moderns?
Most American dance departments now (there are about 400 dance majors offered across the country) are making the move to a more inclusive curriculum due to the confluence of diversity consciousness-raising and new materials that have become available. The possibility of diversity itself has been made possible through political action, of course. What has followed is the academic "writing up" of these activities, which, in turn, spawns new activities - or at least new writings. I am most thrilled by the availability of these new essays/materials/data and believe they are widely available due to technology. But neither the faculty nor the students have been trained to take adequate advantage of them.
My own training was originally in dance and movement analysis, then in experiential anatomy/kinesiology, and most recently in women's studies. With the women's studies training came a formal introduction to sociological methodology, a methodology used often in feminist research. I am interested in whose politics are served by the appearance of certain dance forms and not others in certain settings and not others, and then in the degree to which these politics can be read through a gendered lens. My training both feeds and draws on the new American studies and cultural studies in dance. But I find that I am an insatiable reader of all the new essays and it is through my contact with them that I am most able to help students find the essays/information they seek.
The course here at Denison went through a similar evolution - first one semester, then two, now one again but with a new emphasis. Two years ago I revamped the course adding texts like Jane Desmond's Meaning in Motion, Ann Cooper Albright's Choreographing Difference, and Helen Thomas's Dance, Gender, and Culture. This past year, I expanded the course even more to include the eight-part video series called Dancing and many non-mainstream videos of "post-postmodern" (performance art) work.
Part A:
This summer I will revamp the course again, this time as an Honors course. In addition to works
cited above, the new course will include Helen Thomas's Dance in the City, Randy Martin's Critical
Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics, and Philip Auslander's Presence and Resistance, as
well as popular films that include dance/dancing. I hope to be asking more complex questions and
locating more specific and sophisticated data. My goal is to learn how to locate this and other
information (see below) through library resources rather than through a hit-and-miss system of
personal interest and acquaintanceship. This grant would permit me to work with and learn from
Ann Watson as we make our way through the creation of challenging inquiries served by
technological databases.
Although I am just at the beginning, here is how I am thinking about the course for this Fall:
1) I am in favor of smaller research modules that teach us how to search for and locate specific
studies and data.
2) Honors classes have a limit of 16 students. I am imagining the creation of research/writing
teams of four, each of whom create a specific question related to a general topic like "finances,"
"politics," "philosophies," or "cultural support."
3) I am then imagining the teams reporting to each other in order to reveal various
problem-solving tactics. Then for the next "round" the team has to change "columns" in order to
ask questions about a different genre.
4) Finally, the sources used in the individual modules will then be used to respond to greater
questions of larger impact.
5) So, for example, Group A might first investigate the politics of who can/does and who
can't/doesn't participate in an anti-social form like raves. They are to be seeking very
detailed information, like a set of raves in specific Cincinnati warehouses in the 1980s.) Then
in the second round this group will have to select a different genre, asking, for example, what
cultural arenas participate in folk forms - again in specific ways, like what
sex/class/gender/ethnicity/ etc. attends and competes in the Irish feises in Columbus, Ohio, and
how does that compare nationally? The third round, again moving to a different "column," they
might ask what are the economics of major ballet companies (a concert form) in Bulgaria? Who
funds them? What is the return expectation? How does this budget compare to (a) other Bulgarian
National Companies or (b) other non-Bulgarian national companies? Etc. And in the fourth, who
finances the square dances at the Millersport Corn Festival? Who are the callers? The dancers?
The musicians? And who makes the profit?
Example Grid
| Concert Forms | Folk Forms | Social Forms | Anti-Social Forms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Module #1:The Politics of Participation | |||
| Module #2:Cultural Arenas | |||
| Modules #3:Economics | |||
| Module #4:Philosophy |
6) Simultaneously, I can imagine Ann and me designing hands-on lectures (that is, lectures in front of computers in electronic classrooms) with questions of our own in order to teach how to get to the information. For example, how many and which ballet companies in the former Soviet Union have budgets of [a certain amount] and have been able to sustain those budgets [for how long] through the collapse of communism, employing how many dancers, how many administrators, how many non-dance artists [lighting designers, costumers, etc.]? Then, create grids and tables to reflect that information?
Part B:
The second part of this grant will be used to transfer that information into a one-semester course on Research and Methodology for second-semester Juniors as they tackle the writing of a prospectus for their senior research.
A Time Line for Course Development and Implementation
I suspect it will take the better part of the summer and then constant revising during the semester to make this first course work. It is scheduled to be offered in the Fall, 2001, and is fully enrolled.
The Junior Research and Methodology Seminar will premiere in Spring 2002. It has never been offered before and can draw on the successes and failures of the Cultural Studies course as it is being developed. It will always only have a handful of students in it at a time (6-8), so it permits a personalized version working diligently with each students on longer, more complex research questions than the Cultural Studies course encourages (more students, but shorter time frame to complete less complicated research projects.)
An Estimate of the Amount of Faculty Time that will be Needed to Complete the Project
This is always such a difficult question to answer. Beyond the obvious learning to search for new kinds of information using databases that are not now familiar to me, one of my responsibilities is not to let wane the desire to read and reread the new material available in printed text. I have already ordered several books (about 10) for the course. These texts house information that will be valuable for the students in the course. I will have to continue this practice to see if our database searches are actually turning up the sources I have already found myself through networking.
However, I am excited about the technology aspect because I am hoping it will open up new kinds of questions. I understand it will take an inordinate amount of time to search some questions and far less for others. But I have no real ways of predicting that. The best I can say is this: I am anticipating working on this for half a day all summer - which is reasonably only about 10 weeks long -- and then I have a 12 hour/week commitment to it during the entire academic year.