Credit where it's due

New Zealand's cultural diversity is expressed in a huge variety of dance traditions. KATE TRINGHAM looks at how dance educators are recognising those traditions with credits  toward secondary school qualifications.

Every year thousands of students put a huge amount of time and effort into school musicals, cultural performances for events such as Auckland's Polyfest, and concerts. Increasingly that work and learning, which used to be seen as largely extracurricular, is being recognised with unit and achievement standards.

However, not all school teachers have experience with the great variety of dance movement styles existing in New Zealand, and finding the best ways to integrate cultural dance into the school arts/dance curriculum is not always easy. To address this issue, national dance  facilitator for dance education Patrice O'Brien has written a resource outlining some of the ways to recognise the achievement of students in Maori and Pasifika performances by using NCEA unit standards.

Patrice says she realised a few years ago that the standard of those performances was  extremely high, and deserved recognition.

"It was a real achievement and you had to work very hard to get to that kind of standard,  which we dance teachers know more than anyone. I wanted to get that recognised, and the standards were there and available for people to use, but many hadn't thought of using them or didn't know bhow to go about it."

She says unit standards are an ideal way to assess students for performances such as  Polyfest,because most Polyfest performance groups are large and mixed with some students who are in dance classes and some who are not. By using unit standards, tutors of performance groups do not have to spend time justifying whether students are to gain achieve, merit or excellence.

In her resource, Patrice has outlined the best standards to use for rewarding students, and deliberately looked for standards with a credit rating that accurately reflected the time students spent preparing for competition. Thanks to this resource, a number of schools,  particularly in the Auckland area, are now rewarding their students with NCEA credits.

"It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do to reward dancers for the time they are spending and  the expertise they have," says Patrice.

Emma Bishop, head of dance and drama at Aorere College in Papatoetoe, has followed Patrice's recommendations with success. She has found the unit standards a more accurate reflection than some achievement standards of the amount of work students put into cultural performances.

Emma utilises different unit standards to enable students to explore various aspects of the dance genre and practice and this can include writing about safe practice and the history of their dance culture, the tradition it has come from, and how it has been modernised.

"We use this type of assessment not only for Polyfest, but for our Stage Challenge kids too, because that's another area where kids put in a lot of time and a lot of schools just do it for  the sake of getting them to perform," says Emma.

She adds that assessing students in this way is also good for parents.

"Some think it's taking time away from when students should be doing homework, but now  we can say 'well look, they are going to get credits for doing this'. It also provides another  incentive for them to do some co-curricular activities rather than go home and sit in front of the television."

At a recent fono, there were complaints from the Pasifika community that its dance and culture were not valued highly enough in the New Zealand curriculum, but Emma and many other teachers are striving to redress this imbalance.

"Because the majority of my students are Polynesian and Maori, I look at it from the viewpoint that there has to be a way in for these kids. Doing something relevant to them is, of  course, a way in.

"I have a lot of units which I base around Polynesian motifs – for example I use tapa cloths as a visual stimulus for kids to choreograph from instead of just giving them a general pattern picture. At every opportunity I try and give them something specific to their culture."

Emma has found that while many of her students of Pacific Island heritage can perform their dances, they often don't know the history of the dances or the stories they are singing about.  Researching and writing about the context of the dance gives deeper meaning to and understanding of their culture and dance forms, and is a great motivator for students to enter the NCEA unit standard process.

This year, Emma had 250  students receive credits for their performance work in Polyfest.

"And that's 250 students who have passed at least three more credits for NCEA, and some  of those have got six," she says. Dr Tania Kopytko, executive director of Dance Aotearoa  New Zealand (DANZ), says that the work of Emma Bishop and other innovative dance tutors like her, provide role models for how dance can be developed and used as an effective learning tool.