Showcasing best practice in dance education
Blue Sky Dance offers students and their teachers an opportunity to explore and engage in a great dance education experience.
Aligned to the Victorian Curriculum F-10: The Arts, Dance, this 8-week program creates access to high-quality dance education in rural and remote Victoria, and promotes the benefits of dance in the school setting.
Blue Sky Dance is delivered across two terms via a hybrid model of integrated streaming and face-to-face learning with a specialist team of experienced and qualified dance educators. The program also shows how the benefits of dance and creative expression extend beyond the studio and help students in other areas of the curriculum.
Just as music supports student learning in mathematics, we know that Dance can support the building and consolidation of literacy and language skills. Blue Sky Dance will focus on these areas and guide students to create expressive dances using choreographic tools.
Dr Katrina Rank, Director of Education and Lifelong Learning, Ausdance VIC
Blue Sky Dance is funded by the Department of Education as part of the Rural and Regional School Reform initiative.
Blue Sky Dance is a 3-year funded program. We have delivered the program to hundreds of regional and rural Victorian students since 2021. It is scheduled to run until the close of the 2023 school year.
Pedagogy
Blue Sky Dance has been created around the following pedagogies:
- to be exciting, practical, achievable and interactive
- to be delivered by appropriately qualified and experienced teachers
- to build on concepts so that learning is sequenced and progressive, and linked to the Victorian Curriculum F-10: The Arts, Dance
- to provide guided learning via themes and an interdisciplinary/cross-curricular focus
- to deliver resources for each session (lesson plans, worksheets, pre- and post-session activities, safety advice, assessment information)
- to deliver professional learning opportunities for classroom teachers to develop their skills for ongoing implementation
- to provide synchronous learning experiences (streamed, rather than recorded content and face-to-face delivery)
- to enable greater access to content by saving the recorded content of the streamed classes onto a suitable digital platform—such as FUSE—upon completion of the project.
Professional Development
As well as providing meaningful lessons to students who might otherwise miss out on Dance as a subject, Blue Sky Dance has been designed to equip teachers with skills, knowledge, understanding, and terminology to enable them to more confidently lead dance as a subject in the Victorian Curriculum. They will also learn to use choreographic and dance teaching methods by actively engaging in sessions and facilitating the streamed component in their own classrooms.