Guest Blogger

by Lisa Long Over the past year I have become increasingly aware of the need to educate dancers, dance teachers and parents about the hyper-sexualization of children in dance and beyond. As a college Professor I encounter students just before they make their way into the dance world, and it is with immense hope that I share some remarkable moments that have occurred in my classes this past year. I teach both Creative Dance for Children (CDC), a class geared to teaching the ins and outs of teaching dance in K-12, and Theory and Critique, which encourages students to form and articulate clear opinions based in fact. Within both of these courses, I present the thirty-minute video, Dance Awareness: No [...]

The hypersexualization of women in our Western world has a long, prevalent and unfortunate history.  Sadly, in fact, it is not difficult to verify the tragic pattern of this exploitation.  According to a plethora of research on this topic, the evidence that women are sexualized in print and television advertisements, music videos, video games and the Internet is undeniable (Gow, 1996; Grauerholz & King, 1997; Krassas, Blauwkamp, & Wesselink, 2001).  When discussing the topic of “Sexualization” we need to have a clear definition of what the term “Sexualization” means.  According to the American Psychological Association (APA), sexualization occurs when, “ A person’s value comes from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; A person [...]

Guest Blog Post By: Leslie Bryan, CSUSB Theatre/Dance Faculty The greatest joy for me as a dance educator is to help students find the movements from within and to explore their own sense of aesthetics in the art of dance.  For the past 20 years, I have been a lecturer in the Theatre Arts/Dance department at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) teaching dance education courses for pre-service teachers.  The courses focus on the pedagogy and technique of how to implement dance in public school classrooms.  We explore how to be inclusive in decisions of who gets to dance, how to add depth and scope to dance lessons and how to develop future dancers and patrons of dance who will [...]