As a national leader in arts education, Luna has been sharing the most current practices of teaching dance to children of all abilities, as well as Universal Design for Learning principles, to teachers and dance educators for more than a decade. Currently, under a contract with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, [...]
Read moreJakey Toor is an itinerant dance teaching artist, working with the San Francisco Unified School District’s Visual and Performing Arts Department (VAPA). She teaches weekly dance classes to the entire school population at four sites: Argonne, Longfellow, John Muir and Cesar Chavez elementary schools. On the average, Jakey teaches six classes per day, meaning that [...]
Read moreResearch on Engagement completed Outcome: Luna has been engaged in an action research on parent-child engagement through dance with researcher, Edward Warburton, PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz. Read about the professional development outcomes from our first year in the case study titled, Improving Teaching Practice Through Action Research. After two years of extensive data [...]
Read moreOutcomes & Process: With support from the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Trust, Luna has been working with former Summer Institute participants to build cultures of dance in Southern California. The goals of this process were 1) to leverage the relationships forged through Luna’s SIs to create professional learning communities of dance education in Southern California. [...]
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Outcomes & Process: Beginning January 2011, Luna has partnered with ASI alumnae Erica Rose Jeffrey and the Marin City-Sausalito Parent Center to develop a family dance program for the community. Impact: This program will allow Marin County to build capacity for dance teaching for ALL children. Torri Campbell, a dancer and therapist, is learning to teach parent-child classes and will take over the program in 2012. Other professionals have already expressed interest in the training, expanding the dance resources available in the region.
Teacher Profile: Erica Rose Jeffrey
Dance teaching artist, San Francisco Bay Area
New Highland Academy is the first public elementary school in the state of California to have articulated, year-long, standards-based dance curriculum for EVERY child. Learn more about this Oakland Unified School District dance miracle!
Luna’s special needs inquiry team asked “what does creativity look like for children with autism and other special needs?” Five years at Tilden Elementary, a designated inclusion school in Oakland, California, revealed a great deal about bringing standards-based dance to children with and without special needs.
Dance teaching artist, Rosemary Robertson, completed our MPACT internship at the end of 2009. A third year of supervised teaching has brought parent-child dance classes to dozens of families living in south Alameda County.
The first phase of Luna’s action-research project on parent-child engagement through dance had a dramatic impact on our dance teaching practice.
605 Addison Street
