Rebecca Prather is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Arts Integration Coach with the Larkspur Corte-Madera School District.  She received her M.S. in Communication Disorders (2012) and an M.A. in Women and Gender Studies (2009) from San Francisco State University. As an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, Rebecca danced with the Middle Eastern Ensemble. Rebecca lived in Seville, Spain for three years where she studied flamenco and spent time in Cairo, Egypt where she studied folkloric and cabaret styles of Raks Sharqi.  She wrote her thesis for Women and Gender Studies on the representational politics of American Belly dance, “The Neo-Imperial Harem: Race, Gender, and Nation in American Belly Dance.”  Rebecca is passionate about the body as a cultural text and an agent of social interruption.

Over the past four years with LCMSD, Rebecca has taught arts professional development programs focusing on creative dance as a method of disability inclusion practices, movement and dance to support sensory and social self-regulation, autobiography and performance, community oral histories, and creative dance for narrative building.  She is a member of the Marin County Integrated Learning Specialist Program Advisory Board and the Alameda County ILSP Planning and Implementation Committee.  As a Communication Therapist, Rebecca specializes in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Alternative Augmentative Communication. Her commitment to using the arts is deepened by her experience raising a child on the autism spectrum and witnessing the transformative power of play.

LEADERSHIP GOAL:  to develop leadership and advocacy skills for dance within the arts integration movement by articulating and providing evidence for the uses of dance to support language development, abstract conceptual thinking, and social-emotional reciprocity practices.