In this professional learning workshop Soul Steps company member and founder Maxine Lyle will guide dance educators to experience the stomps, claps, and dynamic rhythms of the rich African American cultural tradition known as step.

Educators will use their bodies to create hip-hop infused rhythms through foundational step choreography. They will also examine step’s early roots in the mines of South Africa, through South African gumboot dance.

Educators will:

• Experience the artistic tap excellence
• Gain access to accurate tap history and influential dancers who shaped taps’ evolution.
• Learn tap terminology (shuffle, flap, time step) and apply the terminology to comprehend tap.
• Engage with embodying tap; and being able to reflect, critique, and connect personal experience to tap.
• Discover choreographic devices and expressive elements of tap including call and response, repetition, time, tone and improvisation, and syncopation.
• Consider how the history and artistic practice of tap to nurtures insight into the themes of othering, emotional vocabulary, imagination, resilience, critical thinking, and problem solving.
• Engage with Turn/Talk, Self-Reflection, and Share Out strategies to assess participant learning.
• Establish criteria that allows them to teach a dance genre that is not included in their training base without appropriating the artistic form.

YA Connections:

NJSLS-VPA:

• Creating: Participants will select tap vocabulary to expand movement possibilities, create patterns and structures and develop a main idea. Use dance terminology to explain movement choices.
• Performing: Participants will Perform planned and improvised movement sequences with increasing complexity in the use of space. Establish relationships with other dancers, increasing spatial awareness and design (e.g., diverse pathways, levels, patterns, focus, near/far).
• Responding: Participants will use genre-specific terminology to compare and contrast recurring patterns of movement and their relationships in dance in context of artistic intent.
• Connecting: Participants will relate artistic ideas and works within societal, cultural, and historical contexts to deepen understanding.

Professional Standards for Educational:

• Respect: Teachers should respect and honor each student’s efforts and offer encouragement.
• Learning styles: Teachers should recognize and accommodate learning styles and abilities.
• Learning Environment: Teachers should strive to create environments that support individual and collaborative learning, and that encourage positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation

Culturally Responsive Practice

Engage with dance practices grounded in the Black & African Diaspora. Teachers will engage with ways to assign agency to students.

Social-Emotional Learning

SEL Competencies including self awareness, self regulation, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making will be embedded into the teaching and learning experience.

When you pair this program with Soul Steps’ workshop or assembly, Maxine provides teachers with in the classroom support implementing creative teaching practices what they have learned into practice.