Social Justice Movement Dance Education Students Bring After-School Classes With a Social Justice Theme to a New Brunswick School
AMANDA BROWN Dance Education grad student Kara Kamenski leading an after-school dance class for second and third graders, part of a program this spring at New Brunswick's Paul Robeson Community School for the Arts.
By Risa Barisch
E
very Wednesday after school this spring, students at the Paul Robeson Community School for the Arts in New Brunswick were moving, dancing, leaping, and twisting, all while learning about community, emotions, and identity.
“Kinetic Connections,” a 10-week program launched in February, taught social justice through dance to upwards of 60 children at the school through a partnership with Rutgers. Graduate students participating in the five-year teacher education program in dance education (EdM), offered jointly by the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and Mason Gross School of the Arts, complete the Students, Communities, and Social Justice course in their final semester while teaching in a local school. The course allows them to combine the concepts they learn in class with real-world practice in presenting “the big ideas of social justice” to school-age children, says Becky Visintainer, a 2016 dance education alum who now teaches the course at Rutgers and works as a dance teacher at North Plainfield High School. “We do a lot of reading about what social justice is in education and some of the current events going on that we could address in classes, but then we ask dance education students, ‘What are your ideas?’ ” says Visintainer. “How do you integrate this through a dance framework where your students can leave having
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learned some dance and also learn social justice and be able to apply it in their everyday lives?” For Cassidy Rivas, who graduated in May, the answer is enriching the New Brunswick community by helping students feel connected to dance. Rivas and her co-teacher, Johsian Martinez-Gonzalez, who also graduated in May, designed their teaching plan to help students understand themselves and those in their neighborhoods. For fourth and fifth graders in their class this means learning social dances with roots in ’80s and ’90s hip-hop as well as Latin dance styles including bachata, merengue, and salsa. “A lot of the students are of Hispanic descent or African American/Black, so making sure that we get them to see and represent who they are in the classroom was really important to us,” Rivas says. “We always cater to the students and the community and what they may need.” Participating in the class makes fourth-grader Mayki Guardado Mendez feel good. “My family, they dance bachata, and then they like to push me in, and I don’t want to dance because I don’t know how, and now I know I can dance,” says Guardado Mendez.
