Piaget for Dance Educators : A Theoretical Study

and hypothetical thinking skills do make group composition a less cumbersome process at this stage and significantly reworking choreography to make improvements becomes a possibility. Students can create dance compositions and then ask “What would happen if . . . .” The complexity of student creative work increases, as individuals are able to focus on four or more dimensions at once. This ability also has implications for skills in imitating movement; individuals can see many aspects of a movement at one time. As students begin to understand categories as abstract concepts, their analytical and evaluative skills increase dramatically. Movement analysis of their own work and that of others becomes possible, and choreographic principles can be discussed in theoretical terms. Students can understand such concepts as unity and contrast, and apply them to their work, whereas in the previous stage these elements had to be described in concrete terms (“Do a strong movement; then do the same movement lightly”). With the growing capacity to think in relation to ideals— what “should be”— adolescents easily become more critical of adults, including teachers. The teacher must now establish credibility through expertise; it does not come automatically. For teachers who are skillful performers, there is sometimes a fine line between establishing their own expertise and setting unrealistic standards. Adolescents not only become more critical of others, but also of their own work, and they become more frustrated by their own inadequacies. As they have greater choice in curriculum selection, they frequently choose to avoid optional coursework such as dance if they feel they do not “measure up.” Yet while students are their own most critical judges, a caring teacher may have to struggle in order to be both honest and encouraging with students. The ability to hypothesize, to imagine all sorts of possibilities that might exist, stimulates adolescents' dreams of utopias and experimentation with a variety of lifestyles. One would hope that this tendency to imagine and experiment would also flower in artistic endeavors, w here it might be more fruitful and less hazardous. In many cases this is true, as adolescent poets and songwriters blossom. In typical United States high school dance classes, however, the avant garde does not flourish, although there is more experimentation than is apparent on the junior high school level. One possible explanation is that adolescent changes in the body make this a less comfortable medium for exploration. However, one could hardly claim that adolescents are disinclined to experiment with and on their bodies in all situations. It seems more likely that lack of an appropriate curriculum and models may be responsible. While all adolescents undergo physiological changes, followers of Piaget have noted that only one third of young adolescents—two thirds at most of the college-age population— give consistent evidence of thinking at the level of formal operations. Piaget has noted that normal individuals by age 20 achieve formal operations only in those areas of thinking in which they have particular interest and expeience. With this in mind, we would expect that young adults with interest and experience in dance would be able to think about dance in abstract and hypothetical terms, but we would not expect students without this kind of background to do so. This would indicate that in classes in dance for adolescent and adult beginners, dance problems need to be presented in the concrete terms described in the section on concrete operations. III. APPLICATIONS: LONGITUDINAL DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED SKILLS Let us now look longitudinally at the development of selected cognitive skills and how this development is reflected in the learning process in dance. We must proceed with some caution, for, as Piaget noted (1962), development occurs earlier in the plane of action than in abstract thought. Without experimental support, it is not possible to establish given age levels for development of specific skills in dance. We can, however, expect a developmental sequence to occur over time. One very significant skill is the child's ability to coordinate a number of dimensions at once. In studying this skill, Piaget looked at the child's performance on classification tasks—for example, classification of a red wooden ball into a category of red wooden spherical objects, as opposed to blue wooden spherical objects, red metal spherical objects, red wooden cubes, and so forth. The child must recognize that each object has several properties, all of which are used as a basis for classification. In dance it seems appropriate to examine how many aspects of a given movement a child may deal with at once. One common example is spatial dimension. At the pre-operational stage, a chld can think about one dimension at a time—going forward/backward or up/down or widening/narrowing. At the next more advanced level, a child can coordinate two dimensions at once—first through trial and error and then immediately or automatically. Next the individual becomes able to coordinate all three spatial dimensions in order to, for example, rise, widen, and advance simultaneously. At the formal operational stage of this task, four or more dimensions could be included, adding perhaps a factor of time or weight. It is important to remember that use of a given image may allow us to “get at” a desired movement much earlier than would be possible using simply abstract terms. For example, the image of popping a soap bubble on the floor in front of a child can coordinate light, advancing, sinking movement withiout “thinking” about it. A similar pattern would follow in solving a problem which involves use of effort qualities. At first a child can coordinate only one effort at a time, the first of which is flow. Over time, the child adds the ability to coordinate space, weight, and time; integration of all elements of effort in one action does not occur until adolescence (Kestenberg, 1967). It seems likely that cognitive development and psycho-motor development are related in determining this kind of pattern. The ability to use transformation is another skill which is dependent upon cognitive development. In dance, one way we can look at transformation is in terms of the ability to use transition between movement and still shapes. When children are in the pre-operational stage of this task, they will tend to lack a smooth transition between previously established starting and ending shapes. They focus only on the shapes, and not on the movement as logical connector. If children at this stage are to demonstrate smooth transitions between shapes, the focus must be on the movement itself, rather than on an external shape to which they must accommodate. At the level of concrete operations, children will be able to find transitions but only through working out the problem in an exercise such as “Find out how you can get from shape A to shape B in one smooth action.” At the next level, children will be able to automatically sense within a given shape the movement which will become the next shape, and eventually they will be able to verbalize how they will make the transition. IV. LIMITATIONS OF PIAGETIAN THEORY FOR DANCE EDUCATION It is apparent from our discussion thus far that Piaget's work can make significant contributions to the understanding of educators in dance as well as in other fields. Yet the dance educator who attempts to apply Piagetian theory to teaching dance will likely discover some areas which seem inappropriate or limiting to an overall view of development in the arts. While critics of Piaget have pointed out errors or limitations which are relevant to cognitive development in general, it seems important at this point to point out several problems which occur in application of this theory to dance education. One major limitation to the applicability of Piaget's work to dance relates to sensori-motor aspects of learning. Piaget acknowledges that the young child uses his or her body to learn cognitively, but indicates that as soon as one can use symbols, it becomes less necessary to use the body for thinking, and when one can think abstractly, concrete experiences become unnecessary for logical thought. Yet dance cannot be created purely through abstract thought. “Thinking with the body” is an apt description for the process in which dancers and choreographers solve problems. This does not imply that the intellect is not involved, but that the sensing body and the intellect remain intimately connected. Other Piagetian researchers (Cowan, 1978) have modified Piaget's conclusions, noting from their own experience that, even once thinking becomes internalized, it retains its active, transformational character, and that active involvement in manipulation of materials should not be just for young children. Similarly, Werner and Kaplan (1964) found evidence not only that all symbols develop from concrete action, but that many words retain “their intimate linkage to, or fusion with, organismic bodily activity” (p. 211). Without the appropriate postural set and internal gesture, a word does not have its full range of meaning. Rugg (1963) found not only that verbal symbols retain the nonverbal, motor-feeling factor, but that this factor is an important key in unlocking the process of discovery, in science as well as in the arts. Einstein noted that his scientific thinking did not occur in verbal images, but as optical and kinesthetic images of movement (North, 1973), stating, “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward” (Rugg, 1963, p. 291). Rugg described this stage of the thinking process as “felt-thought”; this is the same thing dancers mean when they speak of “thinking with the body.” Further, this thinking is not only logical, but also, and even primarily, intuitive. Polanyi (1958) explains that, even in science, knowing is an intuitive process. Logical experiments that verify knowledge follow the initial intuitive understanding. As we educate children in any subject area, we must educate them to value thinking not only logically but intuitively, using not only their minds but also body-level feeling. Yet while there are similarities between science and art in terms of the postural-affective linkage of symbol with its referent, we must also acknowledge that there are differences between science and art regarding the meaning of symbols. Reasoning in science relies on clear and precise symbolic coding—the number 2.75, for example, is assumed to be exactly the same each time it is used. The symbol and that for which it stands are considered to be equal. In the arts, symbols do not have a fixed referent, and they may mean something different each time they are used or have many meanings simultaneously. A given gesture means something entirely different in two different works. Rather than striving to be clear and precise, the experience represented by the arts is “ambiguous, contradictory, or not fully emergent in consciousness” (Czikszentmihalyi, 1978, p. 118). In traditional science, categories are mutually exclusive; quantity A may be either more than or less than quantity B, but not both. Categories in the arts are not mutually exclusive—the perfect hero has a fatal flaw; love and hate, pain and pleasure are often inseparable. Silvers (1978) noted that some symbols (such as ones in science) are used to denote or label, to reiterate the external referent. Such repetition is not considered a virtue in the arts; “derivative” art is not considered to be cognitively significant. In the arts, symbols do not denote, but exemplify—they show, rather than tell. Examples are not the same as labels. While a label may be thought of as the equal of the referent, an example is in some respects narrower and in other respects broader than the referent. To the artist, a symbol does not stand for something which already exists; rather, the arts strive to create a new or transformed reality. Those who use only symbols which reiterate and denote can more readily be considered craftspersons than artists. This implies that it is important for dance educators to use images which have many possible meanings, and to encourage different interpretations of the same material. The goal of the dance educator is not for children to take on his or her reality, but to create their own. Another area to which Piagetian theory seems limiting for dance education is its view of imagination, the process by which movement in dance takes on symbolic meaning. Piaget viewed symbolic imagination as incomplete or immature assimilation. The child imagines that the moon went to see the rain in the clouds only because of an inability to understand the real process (as scientists see it). He also noted that children imagine (pretend) to be something or someone else in order to cope with a difficult reality. He observed that imagination decreases as the child gets older, in favor of “representational tools more adapted to the real world” (Piaget, 1962, pp. 130-31). Piaget's conclusions are based upon the traditional assumption that there is only one “real reality,” which is now being questioned even by many scientists; the conclusions seem to work much better in fields where there is ultimately one right answer than in fields where there are many. In contrast to Piaget's views about imagination, arts educators note that artistic imagination involves not seeing less, but rather seeing more possibilities—using the cognitive skill of seeing multiple dimensions at the same time. According to Olson (1978), aesthetic perception begins not in merely perceiving a drawing as a cat, but at the same time seeing the forms, lines, and colors that give the appearance of the cat. This implies that seeing meaning in movement does not qualify as aesthetic perception; at the same time one must sense the form which is developed to produce meaning. Further, one must understand what is logical or expected— the way things are usually seen—in order to see the illogical or unexpected view which we appreciate as imaginative. One can appreciate the humor of a spoof on ballet only if one knows what the standard “rules” in ballet are (and if one is assured that the choreographer could follow them if he/she chose to do so). In this perspective, imaginative thinking in the encoding or decoding process (i.e., making art or interpreting it) can be seen as the highest level of cognitive development: one must fully understand the bounds of logic, and then decenter further to go outside of them. When we look at imagination in this way, at the process instead of the product, the child's explanation of what makes the night come looks less imaginative and more logical. If we see imagination in the artistic process as an advanced, rather than as an immature level of thinking, then we will assume, contrary to Piaget, that it is very appropriate for adults and is a process to be nurtured through education. Indeed, we can note recent increase in adult interest in uses of imagination for the purpose of improving functioning; such areas as meditation and ideo-kinesis (Sweigard, 1974) are clear examples. Far too often in the dance curriculum, stimulating the imagination is seen as significant for young children only: creative dance classes stop at age eight (or even earlier), when dance technique begins. As dance educators, we must encourage an integration of creative development with development of body skills throughout the educational process. Yet at the same time we note that imagination in the arts requires advanced cognitive skills, it seems important to point out that, to the artist, the child's conception of the world is not something simply to be outgrown and discarded, but to cherished and returned to on deeper levels. Piaget characterizes this “primitive” conception, in part, as follows: Nature presents a continuum of life, such that every object possesses activity and awareness in some degree. This continuum is a network of purposive movements, more or less mutually dependent on one another and all tending toward the good of humanity. Gradually the child picks out certain centres of force within this continuum as being animated by a more spontaneous activity than the rest. (Piaget, 1929, p. 233.) To the scientist, this represents primitive thinking; as long as the child experiences participation of him or herself in Nature, so that his or her actions influence, for example, the moon, the child will be unable to see the separations between things that are necessary for scientific thinking. Yet artists often attempt to “tune into” a deep level of connection with nature. While the scientist “knows” that inanimate objects cannot speak, the artist may confront a twisted piece of wood, or a seashell, or a mountain, and open himself or herself to the “language it speaks.” The dialogue that results may guide the creative process in the arts. The idea that one might communicate with an inanimate object is not part of a scientist's reality, but may be part of the child's and the artist's reality. Even if the motivation for a work is not an external object, a sense of oneness with the movement of the dance, the music, the space, and other dancers is often recognized as an essential ingredient of the dance experience. Without such transcendence, the dancer may feel as though he or she is moving, but not dancing. Piaget (1929) notes that adults may return to more “primitive” states of consciousness in times of stress; the adult who bumps into a table may berate it as though it is a living being who intentionally inflicted pain. The artist may choose to return to such a state, valuing it as a source of artistic creation and aesthetic experience. In order to preserve such a source in his or her students, the dance educator must acknowledge that “reality” is not always the same in the arts as in science or the practical world.