Luna offers workshops for creative practitioners at every stage of their careers. Our Learning & Teaching Series is designed to provide a comprehensive program of study beyond what is learned in a credential program. Teacher as Creative Practitioner Scholar is a series of investigative topics designed as an alternative to traditional graduate school. Topic workshops are created in response to the evolving needs of our field and content-specific strands, such as Early Childhood, explore specific areas of interest in a deep and focused way.
Learning & Teaching Series
Luna’s three-part Learning & Teaching Series charts the course of dance teaching proficiency from a reflective, critical theory perspective.
Learning & Teaching I
Groundworks
This course provides a foundation of dance standards within a culturally responsive teaching framework. Centering creativity, participants deepen their understanding of the elements of dance; explore child development through a Vygoskian lens; learn about human cognition and trauma; examine myths, misperceptions, and biases found in dance teaching; and design dance curricula for their teaching setting. Luna’s Summer Institute covers the same material. All workshop levels include teacher reflection, situated learning theory, and inclusive practices.
Learning & Teaching II
Crafting
After completing Groundworks, participants deepen their understanding of engineering dance lessons and units for maximum creativity and student autonomy. Course content includes backward design theory adapting it to a flexible approach to creativity; learning to teach phrasing, motif development, principles of design, and choreographic solos and duets; establishing learning goals and ways to assess through observation and reflection; and cognition and motivation theories. All workshop levels include teacher reflection, situated learning theory, and inclusive practices.
Learning & Teaching III
Spirals & Rigor
After completing Groundworks and Crafting, participants are ready to create curricular flows from big goals-to-units to sequencing from unit-to-unit and from year-to-year. They learn to teach choreographic skills from phrasing to group forms to using stage space and audience perspective with intention; create authentic assessments; investigate the role Action Research can play to improve teaching; and become confident users of UDL to establish inclusive, culturally-responsive, creativity-supporting experiences for all learners.
Teacher as Creative Practitioner-Scholar
Advanced-level seminars celebrate the intersecting identities of teacher/artist, practitioner/researcher, leader/change agent.
Teacher as Creative Practitioner-Scholar courses provide opportunities to critically examine educational and artistic practice, theory, research, and policy from the perspective of the practitioner. This evolving series includes: TACPS: Action research, TACPS: Creativity, TACPS: Democratizing research literature.
Early Childhood
Children learn through movement, play, and in relationship. Early childhood education (ECE) workshops are designed for all who work with young children.
Dance teaching artists often find themselves in situations where they are expected to teach children of preschool age without having received adequate training. Employers’ expectations do not always consider sound development principles or the holistic nature of young children’s learning. In some cases, neither administrators nor parents understand much about developmentally appropriate dance teaching practices yet impose unrealistic rules, guidelines, and sometimes curricular goals that teachers must navigate to keep their jobs. Teachers come to Luna with instincts about what and how young children need to experience dance and return to their jobs with skills, knowledge, and evidence to create meaningful, developmentally appropriate, creative, fun, and inclusive dance lessons for their young students.
Theories of child development, attachment, culturally-responsive teaching, neurocellular patterning, play, and social-emotional learning are woven into an approach that centers inclusion, equity, and agency in all early learning. Luna’s semester-length workshop Love, Move, Play™ is offered annually, Dance & the Preschool Learning Foundations integration courses explore ways to honor the holistic ways children learn, and Family Dance curricula prepares teachers to expand their programs to include the entire family.
Topic Workshops
Luna’s topic workshops enliven teaching practice and inspire fresh inquiry.
Using deep listening to respond to concerns of practitioners in the field, Luna offers topic workshops taught by our faculty or guest experts. Topic workshops allow an entry point to those new to Luna and offer veteran educators opportunities to delve into an area of interest.
Want to continue your learning at home?
Designed to accompany our Workshops and Institutes, Luna’s book Body, Mind & Spirit in ACTION, and the video series of PERFECT IMPERFECT LESSONS support you in carrying the thread from pedagogy to practice.
Are you a practitioner-researcher?
Consider a 12-month subscription to EBSCO, the world-renowned database for research articles and scholarly journals, via Luna’s membership. Usually only available to university students, EBSCO connects you to research literature to support your inquiry and advocacy.