Educational Practice of Dance Courses in Colleges

Abstract. As the foundation of the strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education, the aim of overall education is to cultivate and promote people’s comprehensive quality to make them have a better balanced development among moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, labor, psychological and other aspects. Among all these, dance education plays a major part to achieve aesthetic education, therefore, setting up dance education courses in colleges is an important method to improve students’ quality and develop educational goals. Dance education takes students’ interests as the first consideration, and the course focuses on three aspects, namely, shape classes, dance appreciation and participation and practice. Through learning dance, aesthetic education goal can be achieved.

Key words: aesthetic education, non-professional institutions, developing dance training.

1. Introduction

Today, overall education is a universal educational concept. As the foundation of the strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education, overall education is in accordance with the need of cultivating and promoting comprehensive competence, and it is the inherent requirement of coordinated development for those educated in the moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic and psychological aspects. Meanwhile, it is the important method to implement the scientific concept of development and achieve people-centered scientific development ideology.

In the process of achieving overall education, aesthetic education is quite important, and dance is an important way during this process. Thus, dance course in colleges is an important part to achieve overall education.

2. Dance――An Important Part in Aesthetic Education

Aesthetic education aims to train students to have a proper aesthetic concept, the ability to appreciate and create beauty and educational activities. Baranov, from former Soviet Union, written in pedagogic that, “Aesthetic education is to train the ability of fully understanding and properly appreciating art and beauty of reality. Aesthetic education should achieve a set of artistic concepts, ideas and beliefs from things with real aesthetic values. At the same time, aesthetic education make students take beautiful factors into all aspects in life, they should against all ridiculous, ugly and inferior things to express their talent in art.” That is to say, aesthetic education will teach students to identify the things with real aesthetic values, cultivate them have the ability to appreciate and identify beauty and ugliness, the desire to express beauty and the ability to create beauty, and develop the potential ability to create arts, meanwhile, it will create conditions for students to “express themselves in arts”. Limited by the exam-oriented education and their own growing experience, most students do not know what aesthetic education is, which deviates from the objective of higher education. Thus, through aesthetic education, the art teachers should promote students’ aesthetic perception and basic skills to develop their artistic potentials, and make their knowledge from aesthetics apply to their life to add luster for future careers.

The best way to aesthetic education is art learning. Firstly, art comes from life but higher than life. It is the product of an artist of figuring out, processing, refining in the mind. Therefore, aesthetic education reflects essential characters of social life, it will help students to know society and during this process, students will be educated in thoughts, feelings, consciousness and morals. Secondly, art has a special influence on those who accept art. Lv Xun once said, arts can discover everything all over the world, and it can tell all truths and laws, but science cannot. The effect of it does not lie in teaching, but self-cultivation. The special role of art education cannot be substituted by any other events, so people should pay more attention on it.

Among the whole art education system, dance education fully reflects the soul of aesthetic education, the media to express our real emotion. Just as written in Books of Songs, poetry is the expression of thinking, it is called thought in mind, and it is called poetry in words with emotion but in the form of word. If words, sighs and songs cannot express the emotion, dance will be the best choice. It is easy to find out that dance is more direct, more delicate than any other forms of art in expressing emotions. Meanwhile, dance requires less on personal quality. Comparing with professional dance,dance education is unique. It is an education based on laws of dance beauty to shape people, an education following inherent human nature development. Through the cultivation and shape of individual aesthetic psychological structure, the effect of inspiring true and good by art will be really achieved. It is also an overall education of promoting individual comprehensive development and making the most of human potential, a life education of improving quality of life and realizing the value of life. While, teaching process or appreciators, in a large degree, expect to keep pace with professional dance education in practice. By learning the basic movements, students should acquire some knowledge of dance appreciation, and those with potentials will be found out to lay a basis for cultural quality for future careers.

3. Major Methods of Setting Dance Courses in Non-Professional Institutions

It is an important way to achieve overall education through setting up dance courses in non-professional institutions. Non-professional dance education is a universal dance education, an esthetic education touching people with emotion and beauty, aiming at inspiration and cultivation. The purpose does not lie in skills but in realizing “love” in dance.

According to Lv Yisheng’s point in Dance Education, based on different requirements of different types of dance services, some related dance courses will be set up to meet different education purposes.

For instance, making students experience and develop positive, optimistic thoughts and feelings will contribute to the cultivation of communist ideals; teaching folk dance will cultivate patriotic emotion, group dance is better for learning collectivism and solidarity; energetic dance will teach them be brave and aggressive. In addition, dance will make body flexible to improve students’ thinking patterns. The rhythm of dance will teach them sense of music and rhythm, helping them form graceful behaviors and correct posture and it is good for physical fitness.

How to set up dance courses? For the lack of dance professional quality in ordinary colleges, progressive approach will be adapted. From physical course, dance appreciation, participating practice, the teaching should get rid of teaching process randomness, the students will feel the charming of art through “knowledge, emotion, aspiration, behavior” to improve the comprehensive ability.

Dance education in non-processional institutions is mainly divided into two types. The first one is organized dance groups, such as dance team, dance associations. The second one is setting up optional courses. No matter which type it is, it will start from physical training. Physical training is the foundation and the key to open the road to dance. Flexibility, coordination, rhythm of gestures are needed accumulated bit by bit. Through three months training, students may feel boring because the training is single and repeated. Thus, dance appreciation and participation practice should be used to enhance students’ interest and stimulate initiative and creativity in learning. Through dance appreciation course, such as watching classical dance drama, dance film communicate with students art groups in other institutions, professional dancers and music, students will get an enormous visual and audio impact. It can not only improve students’ perception ability, but also help to imitate, understand and accept in the following learning process. The most important is that students can enhance appreciation for the beauty and ugliness during this process. Participating practice is an effective method to consolidate and test educational outcomes and continuously stimulate students' interest in dance, so that students will truly understand the meaning of “one minute on stage, ten years in practice”. A prefect performance on stage requires repeated exercises, in which dance expression form will be consolidated, physical quality will be strengthened, and the feel of stage will be cultivated. Stage show-off is the essential quality for dancers. In teaching, some students express emotion well in dancing, however, on the stage, they are afraid of performing, forgetting moves, disorder in rhythms. After performing, they often feel guilty. If this continues for a long time, they will show their fear in performing. Under this condition, teachers cannot blame them, but encourage them and help them to overcome psychological barriers by modeling stage performance.

Above all, non-professional dance education in common colleges can cultivate a lot of dance appreciation audience with high level, a group of great dancers, which is good for creating a positive campus culture, achieving overall education aims and enhancing aesthetic standards in social level. Besides, it plays a positive role in promoting students’ growth. The above not only requires leaders in colleges put emphasis on thoughts and material condition, but also needs educators to work hard together. The development of dance courses in common colleges will have a promising future.

References

[1] Lv Yisheng. Dance Education, Shanghai Music Press, 2004.

[2] Zhao Bingxin. On value orientation of non-professional dance education, Journal of Beijing Dance Academy, 2005(3)