Multiple Writing Processes

If Howard Gardner’s ideas about multiple intelligences have done nothing more, they have at least pointed up the commonsense notion that everyone learns in his or her own way. It follows, therefore, that those who write also approach that task in a way particularly suited to their own learning/idea-processing styles. About twenty years ago in a small publication titled Model for Teaching Writing: Process and Product, I argued that there is no single “writing process” but many processes, all equally capable of producing successful writing when suited to the individual writer.

Despite my efforts and those of others, the teaching of writing in many classrooms is codified as a linear/logical process. This ignores, in particular, students who are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. Consequently, a couple of years ago I published a book specifically to address the needs of these students. Titled Teaching Writing to Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners, this book offers strategies for teaching students who learn best by seeing, hearing, or doing/moving. (More about this book at http://www.corwinpress.com/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book228025&)

William Zinsser, in his classic On Writing Well (2001) said this: “There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you. Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and then revise; others can’t write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first” (p. 5)

It’s a good idea to keep this sort of diversity in mind in other fields of endeavor as well. A wide range of work and idea-processing styles also can be found among visual artists, from painters to filmmakers; composers; dancers and choreographers; and others who strive for creative expression.

Dance Education for All

Lately, because of some recent discussions with the board of our local Windfall Dancers school and company here in Bloomington, Indiana, I’ve been thinking about the nature of dance education and, to be frank, its general absence from the public school curriculum. Dedicated dance classes are a rarity, and dance departments are virtually unheard of (though, of course, there are exceptions).

One reason for the absence of dance in the curriculum is lack of recognition that dance is a kinesthetic art form from which all students would derive benefit. In most schools, if dance is touched on at all, it is in the context of physical education. The physicality of dance gets it lumped in with dodge-ball and track. Indeed, acrobatics have long been a part of the dance repertoire. Take a look at the Nicolas brothers, Donald O’Connor, or contestants on the popular television show, “So You Think You Can Dance.”

But dancing and dance education are about more than physicality. Poet John Dryden called dancing “the poetry of the foot.” To Martha Graham, dance was “the hidden language of the soul.”

Isadora Duncan summed up the art this way: “There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.”

Thus it always has been difficult to situate dance in the school curriculum, and this difficulty often has relegated dance education to the fringe — and add-on rather than a core subject for all students.

Merce Cunningham, the renowned dancer and choreographer who died at age 90 in April this year, spent much of his life as a teacher of dance and as a strong advocate for dance education. But he also recognized the challenges not only of dancing but also of teaching others to dance. Dancing is movement, and movement by its nature is ephemeral. Cunningham put it this way: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”

And so the challenge for educators who believe, as I do, that the arts — all of the arts — are fundamental to our development as holistic beings, is somehow to capture the ephemeral that is so much the reality of dance and situate it in the core of schooling. Dance should not be merely an add-on, an occasional lesson in P.E. class, an after-school activity, or something a few students do in the context of other activities, from glee club to show choir. Dance is something that all students need to experience.