Learning through Dancing

While dancing is a form of arts education, physical education, or extracurricular activity in schools, its impact, significance, utility, and relevance—as a learning process, methodology, and evidence of acquired knowledge—remain underexplored. Researchers in Education, Somatic practices, Dance Pedagogy, Arts Integration, Cognitive Science and Neuroscience have demonstrated the benefits and potentials of movement and dance to engage students, energize learning, foster belonging, support cognition, and connect to curricular content in other subjects than dance itself, yet dancing in the classroom remains an exception, not the norm. Learning through Dancing aims to change that.

Learning Through Dancing aims to collect, connect, and further develop dance practices for use in preschool, primary, and secondary school classrooms to enhance embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended learning processes. Integrating dance and movement more deeply into teaching methods and curricula for general academic subjects is meant to: reinforce academic concepts and skills through experiential, interactive, and participatory learning paradigms; contribute to integration and collaboration among different types of learners; and support students' overall wellbeing through the social, emotional, and self-regulation skills developed through dancing together. The aim is to develop ways of integrating and activating students’ bodies, minds, and selves in holistic learning processes, through accessible tools and formats that everyday classroom teachers can use.

Learning through Dancing leverages the sensorimotor, cognitive, emotional, creative, and social skills advanced in dance to improve general education. Building on existing research on dance integration in education, current neuroscientific perspectives on learning, and my PhD research on dancing-thinking as a way of “making sense with the senses,” I combine various knowledges to advance teaching strategies for kinaesthetic learning. From the fundamental neurodevelopmental patterns that underly every body’s process of moving to learn, to correlations between physical and cognitive skills that might enhance curriculum design, to the development of assessment paradigms for embodied knowledge, this research aims to make classroom learning more physical, dynamic, and enactive through methods marrying knowledge from artistic, scientific, and educational research. By sensitizing people to themselves, each other, and their environments in agential and empowering ways, dancing can help students become more active within and responsible for their learning and help teachers reach students who may lose interest in more sedentary learning paradigms. The timely urgence of this research lies in counteracting the proven negative effects that increased screen time, social media, and sedentary classrooms have on youth by foregrounding the body's fundamental intelligence as central in learning and development.

Learning through Dancing includes a two-year visiting scholar post at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, MA (USA), as well as field work in schools. Further exchange and skill development takes place with The Movement Arc in Vancouver, BC (Canada), and National Dance Institute, New Mexico (NDINM). The research grant is hosted and administered by Stockholm University of the Arts.

The Swedish Research Council & Stockholm University of the Arts

Cecilia Roos, SKH

Steve Seidel, Harvard Graduate School of Education

2025: groundwork, prior research and literature review, skill development. Fall 2026-Spring 2028: Harvard University Graduate School of Education. 2028: final publication and reporting.

www.eleanorbauer.info