Rebecca Pappas

Teaching Statement

Page 1

Teaching Statement Rebecca Pappas

I recently had a student tell me, I cant b.s. with you Rebecca, Ive gotten
away with a lot of stuff in a lot of classes. But you can see when Im not
working hard, and you tell me. You dont let me get away with it. This is the
highest compliment I have ever received from a student. It is exemplary of the
kind of classroom I want to create a rigorous environment where students feel
seen and accountable but comfortable telling me what they are thinking.
My interest in a transformative and open classroom is inspired by my
background in early childhood education and especially by my own instruction
in the works of revolutionary educators Paulo Freire and Vivian Paley. I believe
that educators have the potential and the responsibility to scaffold their
students towards new skills, new ideas and new directions as artists and as
people. I believe firmly that moments of newness when one stumbles upon
aptitudes and questions, knowledge and discourses that feel unfamiliar or
revelatoryare the payoff moments of both education and art making.
This comment came at the end of a choreography class where I answered
students weekly studies with a detailed written assessment of each piece and
a set of exercises and questions that I hoped would inspire and propel them in
new directions. Every seven days we examined the same piece of
choreography through a new lens recording all of our work on video and
continually reinventing the same piece of choreography. Inspired by a studio
art class I had taken, I asked students to develop portfolios, requiring them to
re-present and analyze all of the work that they had done at the end of the
quarter. In this re-presentation patterns, tendencies and interests started to
emerge. This process was not merely a means of recording work, it was a
chance for students to engage in an ever deepening reflective process. In
dance, where our work is so ephemeral, and the moment-to-moment practice
can be elusive, it is important that teachers establish means to record and
assess our students work and to grow pupils ability to discuss and understand
dance as an art form. I strive to build this examination more firmly into dance
practice.
In my dance history and dance studies courses, I train students to ask and
answer questions about the text they are reading, the performances they are
viewing, and their own studio practice. I want them to use Dance Studies as a
way to observe and talk about the body in everyday life, and for this reason I
frequently take pop culture as a subject of inquiry. My classes have analyzed
the racial politics of Miley Cyrus' VMA performance in order to understand
minstrelsy and watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as an inquiry into
the commercial uses of the American dancing body. I integrate movement into
every class session, tearing down false dichotomies between the body and the
mind

Rebecca Pappas
Teaching Statement

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In my technique classes too, we move between practice and analysis. We

endeavor to be fully embodied in our dancing while at the same time
understanding the goals, principles, and contexts behind what we are doing.
Informed by my training in both modern and post-modern dance, my technique
classes is an eclectic mix of Feldenkrais, Klein release, ballet, and classical
modern dance practices including Taylor and Cunningham. I feel that the most
dynamic training develops an ability to move supplely between different
understandings of the body and I encourage students to work towards a flexible
instrument, dancing between oppositions such as muscular/skeletal, core/distal,
standing/prone, held/released.
I see teaching as a complimentary dialectic process where both learner and
teacher are continually experimenting: How does my tendu work if my weight
shifts backwards towards my heel? the learner asks. Do students grasp this
exercise better if I talk through it slowly, or if I push them to immediately join in
moving? the teacher wonders. Does this dance have something to say about
race or gender? the student queries. Shall I ask them to think about 20th
Century Dance History as a chronological series of personalities or as a variety
of different approaches to the body? the teacher considers. This process of
questioning, experimenting, reflecting, and communicating is, in the end, how
learning (and moving) happens.