Teaching Strategies Created By Children In Dance Tutorial Videos

Abstract

Over the last five years, we have witnessed a fascinating social phenomenon in which children from various cultures create authentic, "home-made, amateur dance tutorial videos" (HAD-TV). This paper describes an analysis of qualitative research aimed to identify and describe teaching strategies applied by children in 20 HAD-TV retrieved from YouTube. The videos are less than six minutes and are heterogenic with respect to gender (girls, boys), culture (American, Israeli), and type of movement (separate, sequential). Data analysis was based on an ethno-visual model and a neutral lexicon of an analytical model. The analysis yielded two major categories (doing and saying “what”/”how” to do) and four sub-categories: “doing what to do” (e.g., demonstration for imitation), “saying what to do” (e.g., onomatopoeia), “doing how to do it” (e.g., self-touch), and “saying how to do it” (e.g., instructions for complex movements that may involve multiple actions and body parts). Findings show that children learn and teach mainly through demonstration and imitation and intuitively know how to produce using the same teaching strategies taught in formal dance teaching institutions. These findings can illuminate the process of meaningful learning whereby independent learners can become helpful teachers by providing insights on effective learning. The findings may contribute to the enrichment and accuracy of teaching strategies in non-formal settings in various areas beyond dance education.

Keywords: Dance education, independent teaching-learning, media, teaching strategies

Introduction

A fascinating social phenomenon has been occurring over the past five years in which children from various cultures independently learn, perform, and teach dance movements through the creation of authentic “home-made, amateur dance tutorial videos” (HAD-TV). Thus, alongside official dance classes taught at schools (or dance studios), an independent, self-produced, and updated digital, virtual teaching-learning zone in which children are actively involved is developing. The children's teaching-learning process is natural, spontaneous, and non-institutional (i.e., non-formal learning), but it is not accidental and is conducted according to planned, organized patterns of formal teaching strategies of which the children are fully aware, as demonstrated by their planned, organized, and initiated actions when uploading videos to the web. This paper focuses on these natural, non-formal independent teaching strategies and analyzes the children’s perceptions of how learning occurs and thus how to teach.

Problem Statement

• HAD-TV on social media is a relatively new development.
• HAD-TV on social media offers a rich source of potentially meaningful teaching strategies.
• There seems as yet to be no systematic investigation of HAD-TV and associated teaching strategies, and empirical data of this phenomenon is scarce.
• Therefore, this study was conducted with the aim of examining the teaching strategies.

Research Questions

What teaching strategies are applied by children in dance tutorial videos on social media?

Purpose of the Study

The study aims to identify and describe teaching strategies applied by children in dance tutorial videos on social media. Some of the strategies were pre-defined based on research by Harbonnier-Topin and Barbier (2012) and the professional experience of the researcher. Some strategies emerged from the analysis of the data collected in this study.

Research Methods

Methodology was qualitative in approach, in which the study is meant to explore and understand the meaning that individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem and where data analysis proceeds inductively from particulars to general themes with the researcher interpreting the meaning of the data (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). The research field comprised visual materials (HAD-TV) on the web (YouTube). The corpus of data comprised 20 dance-tutorial videos retrieved from the media that were produced by children and that had been identified as using teaching strategies applied by the children. Selection criteria included video length (up to six minutes), equal representation for boys and girls, culture (American, Israeli), and type of movement (separate, sequential).

Findings

In total, thirty teaching strategies were identified which, when categorized, could be divided into two major categories: “Doing and saying to do” and “Doing and saying to do it.” The former refers to teaching strategies that present the movements are (with or without verbal accompaniment); the latter refers to teaching strategies that use various ways to explain to perform the movements. These categories were further divided into four sub-categories depending on whether the strategy was physical (doing) or verbal (saying).

Table 1 lists all the strategies divided into their sub-category. The first sub-category, “doing what to do,” includes only one teaching strategy, demonstration, but this is the principal way of teaching dance movements in children’s HAD-TV. The second sub-category, “saying what to do,” includes seven teaching strategies that involved verbally describing the movements as they were being done. The third sub-category, “doing how to do it,” includes fifteen strategies for emphasizing the ways the movements should be done; and the fourth sub-category, “saying how to do it,” includes seven teaching strategies for verbally explaining how to perform the movements and referred to the relationship between the different types of movements.

Following is a detailed analysis breakdown of one of the teaching strategies: slowing down and accelerating movements. (Note: these were usually done “in real time” during filming, but sometimes they were done during the editing process.) In other words, the movements are demonstrated at different speeds depending on the purpose. Sometimes they are slowed down so that the viewer can easily follow the movement; sometimes the movement is done faster to demonstrate how the movement, when perfected, should look or to show the skill that can be achieved. There are some HAD-TV where slowing down is the only strategy used. For example, Pintelz (Video 1) uses this strategy in every movement she teaches and Harry Flood (Video 3) slows down at each phase and adds a verbal explanation. In other videos, the children use both strategies in the teaching process: for example, Betsy Gin (Video 2) first demonstrates the sequence slowly while teaching the movements and then accelerates her presentation to show the entire sequence. Jasmine (Video 5) begins by performing a movement slowly, thus allowing the viewer to follow easily, later accelerating to allow building the correct skills. Go Boy (Video 9) also first performs the individual movements of a sequence slowly (while explaining every movement) and then accelerating. At the end, he first performs the whole sequence slowly in order to revise the movements and then performs them quickly to demonstrate how the final results look. Noam Amram (Video 10) starts with a quick demonstration of the whole movement, but then teaches it by starting slowly and then accelerating the movements until reaching the proper rate of performance. Amy (Video 11), Avi (Video 13), Alik (Video 14), Ella (Video 16), Shahaf (Video 17), Tal (Video 18), and Abigail (video 20) all teach the individual movements slowly, but when they perform them in sequence, they do it in the proper rhythm. Dan (Video 12) and Alona (Video 19) also begin teaching slowly and then accelerating the rhythm. Finally, Batzi (Video 15) method uses a unique method: he teaches a sequence of movements and performs each individual movement at a different rhythm. In this way, slowing down and accelerating the movements appear intermittently in the same sequence of movements.

Conclusion

The findings demonstrate that children learn and teach mainly through demonstration and imitation and intuitively know how to produce the same teaching strategies that have been used over the years in dance teaching institutions. The findings of the phenomenon of independent teaching-learning can illuminate meaningful learning processes, and thus independent learners may become helpful teachers who can provide insights into effective learning. The findings may contribute to the enrichment and accuracy of teaching strategies in education in general, in various fields beyond dance education. This paper finds that the media is a gainful arena that allows children to acquire 21^st-century digital, creativity, partnership, and innovation skills.

Further studies can establish and extend this article's findings. These might include examining the relationships between teaching strategies and the videos' characteristics and features (gender, language, movement, music) or qualitatively investigating the experiences and the motives of children in independent learning-teaching. Finally, although the article’s findings are not generalizable, they present unique perspectives for understanding the independent learning-teaching processes of children.

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