The Visible Effects of So You Think You Can Dance: Reactions to a Popular Culture Phenomenon in Dance Education

This paper provides an analysis of the factors influencing cultural perceptions of dance for young children, and their effect on the presence of children’s dance as arts education, and as an arts integration strategy within public school settings. On April 2 of this year, the U.S. Department of Education released a study entitled Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999-2000 and 2009-10. This study was previously published in 2002, prior to implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Arts education advocates were very pleased to finally see an update, even if a full decade later. But the report offers mixed results in support of arts education. According to the report, music and visual art are widely available in schools in some form in schools nationwide; however, dance and theater are far less available. Access to arts education in general remains elusive to a tremendous number of students across the nation. Yet as part of our culture, dance is perhaps more visible than ever as a phenomenon in the U.S., made popular in the media through shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars. Do these public images, though, help or hurt the dissemination of dance education beginning in early childhood? What of the studio culture that is most often associated with dance for children? Through multiple lenses including those of dance educators, media executives, public education administrators and parents and children, I will seek causal relationships in how we have perhaps hurt efforts to make dance as arts education more widespread at the elementary level, and determine what (if anything) might be learned and “fixed” as a result of recent declines in dance availability