Strategic Partnership for Dance in Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Strategic Partnership for Dance in Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

The Strategic Partnership for Dance in Education was created by three organizations from three European countries – „Hobby Folk” Association from Lithuania, „Olza” Association form Czech Republic and „Passionfruits” Association form Poland, which has taken upon itself the role of coordinating and applying organization. Our main goal was to improve quality of dance classes in kindergartens and primary schools as well as to promote the use of dance as an educational tool. We wanted to reach this goal by approaching the problem form an innovative perspective – we prepared a set of educational tools that were to help teachers in their work with kids and allow them to use dance in a new way. They have been prepared with utmost care for quality and merit but at the same time with the same care for ease of use even for those who are not used to dealing with dance at a daily basis. This approach allowed us, dance instructors, to take up the main burden of teaching dance classes – through the tools that we will prepared, and also allow the teachers to get back to their main role as educators and overseers of the whole process.

Our project was a direct response to the needs of preschool and primary school teachers which we have defined running a survey among them. We have been aware of those needs for some time now – many representants of the teaching community have voiced them during our previous undertakings. The fore-mentioned survey, which we run in cooperation with associations of teacher in our countries, has allowed us to choose precisely those tools, the implementation of which had the best chance of showing most positive results.

The prepared set of tools consist of:

1. 15 musical pieces based on the traditional folk melodies stemming from our countries, all of which were professionally arranged for and recorded by a symphony orchestra.

2. Choreographies prepared in three versions for each musical number. We hoped that providing alternatives would help to better fit the choreographies to groups of kids, which tend to vary in numbers and representation of different sexes.

3. Video recordings of each choreography performed by a dance group. They acted as a visual aid to the fore-mentioned choreographies and have also provided information on executing particular steps and figures.

We have planned the execution of our project for two years. In the first phase, form September 2016 to September 2017, we have focused on preparing all of the mentioned intellectual results and materials and making them available to teachers on an open-license basis through a special website – dance4education.eu. The next school year – 2017/18 – was devoted to implementing and promoting the created materials at a series of meetings with teachers, during which they were able to get support in using the tools, and at dance shows summing up the effects that working with kids using those tools provided. At the same time we were gathering feedback, which has allowed us to introduce changes if necessary before we closed the project in September 2018.

We assumed that during our implementing activities we will directly reach at least 800 users. Even with the scope of our implementing activities greatly diminished by experts during the application assessment proces (from 14 planned events to just 6), we were able to reach that goal and even surpass it. The main target group of our actions were kindergarten and primary school teachers as well as their pupils. Through extensive promoting activities we managed to reach a wide audience – materials are being downloaded form our website not only in Europe, but also from locations in South and North America and even Asia.

Even during the two years our project lasted we were able to see how needed and deeply anticipated the materials we offered were. We hope to have caused a visible improvement in the quality of dance classes and a rise in popularity and use of dance-based educational tools. We are aware of the fact that the duration of our strategic partnership was only the beginning of the process of change, which is why we took steps to increase the longevity of the results of our work and will also closely monitor the situation after the project finishes.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 96357 Eur

Project Coordinator

Stowarzyszenie “Passionfruits” & Country: PL

Project Partners

• Asociacija “Hobby Folk”
• Místní skupina Polskeho kulturne-osvetoveho svazu v Ceskem Tesíne – Olza z.s.