Pamela Geber-Handman and Christine McMillan Presented at DSSE Conference

Professor Pamela Geber-Handman and Associate Professor (Lecturer) Christine McMillan (Dance) were invited to present a session titled "Post Covid Anatomy Teaching:  What are we doing now that we didn't do before?" at the Dance Science and Somatic Educators Conference in June at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

Geber-Handman and McMillan described the session as follows:

“In this presentation, we shared pedagogical revisions to our university-level Anatomy for Dance courses since re-emerging from the covid-19 shut-down. For a couple years, we taught this remotely and often, asynchronously. We video recorded many lectures, trying to inspire ways for students to find meaningful connections to the material. Our most important goals were to inspire a curiosity in anatomy for dance, add meaningful anatomical tools to their dancer tool kit and in particular, reduce stress during a highly tense period of time in our history, something immediately linked to levels of investment. 

We asked ourselves how to assess and grade their work since these are university level courses for credit. A student’s perception of how they are graded affects the ways in which they engage (i.e. “teaching to the test”). Out of necessity teaching remotely, all quizzes and exams became open-book. All videoed lectures became as interactive as possible, imperfections included. Our online teaching emphasized how and why, rather than mastery of what. The hope was to allow them to practice without the pressure of perfecting but instead, engaging in a more playful and forgiving way.  

As we began re-emerging to in-person course delivery later, we realized the value in these shifts and opted to continue and build upon many of them, details we’d like to share in our presentation. Our perspectives were also informed in part by Universal Design for Learning and a University of Utah project: Inclusive Design/Design Justice. We feel that our more inclusive and practice-based approach is accommodating more diverse learning styles and supports a growth-oriented environment.”

You can find more on the Dance Science and Somatics Educators Organization here.