Margaret H’Doubler: dance and its place in education
Fernando Battista
The contribution talks about Margaret H’Doubler, considered the pioneer of educational dance. She revolutionized the teaching of dance reconceptualizing it and placing the arts as vital educational forces conceived and taught as tools for the development of body and mind. During the years 1916-1917 H’Doubler was a student in John Dewey’s course of philosophy and aesthetics at the Teachers College of Columbia. She was deeply impressed by his teachings on which she based her educational metodology through dance, revolutionary for the time. The aim was to prepare teachers to be able to transmit a dance for everyone starting from physiology and leaving great space for self-expression and creativity. She was deeply inspired by the principles of Dewey’s own active pedagogy, and was firmly convinced in the use of dance as an effective educational tool capable of stimulating imagination and intellect and developing relational and social skills. H’Doubler inspired a different way of thinking and doing dance as a form of artistic, creative and democratic experience, as a base for the growth of the person. H’Doubler wrote, in The Dance, and its Place in Education (1925, p. XI), that dance was a way of «rising a free and complete individual» and «a resource for a happy life that can be performed everywhere and without special equipment». In fact, she believed that it could transmit «a philosophy of life».
Keywords
Dance, Education, Body, Exploring, Grow-up.
