Dance Education for Underserved Youth

K-12 STEAM education

South Bay

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

The Firebird Dance Program seeks to address the importance of access to arts education, especially for underserved students. Research shows that exposure to the arts strengthens students' problem-solving and critical thinking skills, adding to overall academic success, improved test scores and social skills, and overall development. The program also aims to add diversity to the dance world, especially in ballet, by offering dance classes to individuals of color who are underserved and underrepresented, as well as hiring teaching artists and performers from diverse backgrounds so students can see themselves represented in the arts. The program also fosters the social-emotional health of children, helping them exercise, relieve stress, and understand healthy discipline, as well as learn about emotions, how to express them, and learn empathy and compassion while practicing with their peers. Dance as exercise also addresses the rise in childhood obesity with a focus on healthy habits.

The The Firebird Dance Program provides on-site dance instruction at public schools in Los Angeles. The Van Deene Firebird Dance Program will expand on our success of bringing arts education directly to students by expanding the program to a full scale, multi-faceted dance program serving all 330 students of all ages at the school from TK-6th grade. Students will participate in twice weekly dance workshops taught by highly-skilled and diverse teaching artists coming directly to their school, with a culmination performance in December and May. This is a longstanding aspect of our outreach programs and is proven to be successful. Lesson plans are crafted to align with California content standards in Visual and Performing Arts, and evaluation plans help track each student's goals and progress. The program will be expanded to also bring highly trained teaching artists to provide workshops in Musical Choreography to support dance in theater and Dance Team training to support those who want to pursue competitive dance. Because of the strong evidence showing how arts and dance support academic and social-emotional success, this program is also including 4 professional development workshops for the academic teachers and teaching artists to learn how to blend literacy instruction with physical movement, exploring how kinesthetic strategies boost memory, language acquisition and collaborative skills.

Our vision is to make arts education available to all students regardless of income, nationality or ethnicity and to foster diversity in the greater world of dance and ballet. Arts education in schools provides benefits to students by improving problem-solving and critical thinking skills, adding to overall academic success and enhancing social skills, as well as promoting a healthy lifestyle and helping to build coordination, flexibility, and self-esteem. We expect the success of this new model of dance education to be highly sought after at other schools throughout Los Angeles. We plan to duplicate this model for other schools with the availability of funding and support in order to increase the impact of dance and arts education for the students of Los Angeles.