Cultural mix is spiced by dance

6th January 1995, 12:00am

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Cultural mix is spiced by dance

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/cultural-mix-spiced-dance
Teacher: Julie Wall, Age: 42, School: Handsworth Wood Girl’s School, Birmingham, Post: Head of performing arts.

Julie Wall’s first passion is dance. Her second passion is the teaching of it. She wants students to grow in maturity, confidence and imagination through the vehicle of dance.

As a physical, creative and emotional exercise, dance is demanding and students have to be handled carefully. She teaches in a mixed-race school, mainly Asian and Afro-Caribbean, of 750 girls.

“These are my hormonal time-bombs,” she says. “You have to be very sensitive, quick to pick up on what’s going on, to pick up the innuendos when someone has fallen out with somebody else. I never get to the stage of having to face confrontation.

“Sometimes I coax, sometimes I squash, though I’m not a disciplinarian. If Miss Wall has to shout then they know something’s gone very bad.”

Julie Wall is more than willing to use the girls’ own music in order to kindle interest. She uses Jungle a mixture of rave and reggae or Hindi music, or hip-hop; in fact anything that happens to be current in her pupils’ lives.

She describes a choreography class. “one of the girls in this group is the choreographer using Jungle music. If any of the other girls can’t do the moves I translate for them. I’ve learnt the latest Jungle moves; I have to be prepared to do that, otherwise we wouldn’t get anywhere.

“Also I think it’s good for them to see their teacher learning things as well. Two girls who truant are attending school at the moment because they want to do this dance. If they gain in confidence here, this can give them confidence with their other subjects.

“You have to be prepared to lay yourself open a bit, to make yourself a little bit vulnerable. The last thing many of my staff colleagues would do is ask the kids where they’re coming from, but I have to get in there. That way we all learn.”

During the three years she has worked at Hands- worth, Julie Wall has had to command the skills to navigate some tricky cultural territory: “In my school there are so many cultural differences and it’s sometimes difficult to get them to have a responsibility for each other’s cultures. Some of the Afro-Caribbean girls for example, who are into Jungle, won’t tolerate Hindi music.

“This week I sat my year 9 girls down and showed them a dance film which combines Hindi with jazz and hip-hop. Suddenly they could all see Hindi in a new light. We’re all on common ground reallyIbut it’s finding that common ground”.

Julie Wall trained as a PE teacher with a dance specialism. She chose her first school because it had two purpose-built dance studios, but was appalled to find they were used for indoor football. A school with dance on the timetable must be fully committed to it. Otherwise she is not interested in teaching there.

For seven years she was dance-director of the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham and was the first to take dance companies out to schools.

During that time she also taught dance to the under-fives, “mini-movers” as she calls them.

“Those little ones are very honest,” she says. “they make you very aware of what they want. I built up teaching skills then which I still use - when to talk straight to the child and when to approach them indirectly.”

She is also into her third series of writing the Let’s Move and Time to Move dance programmes for BBC radio 3 aimed at primary school teachers. That, she says, has enabled her to get to grips with the language of dance, to see it as a vehicle for learning.

“Dance is a subject through which many personal, moral and social issues can be learnt.

“I see children of all ages grow in confidence and take responsibility for themselves through dance. I am biased, but then I have to be.”

Julie Wall remembers one girl in particular who hated dance, hated undressing for that second lesson on a Monday morning. “But she was a gifted student in poetry, so I got hold of a copy of one of her poems. I got a sense of rhythm from it and worked out a dance which I performed to the words.

“When I performed it before her class I could tell she was thinking ‘hold on, I’ve heard that somewhere before’. If you take time as a teacher to respond to what they have in them then you can help. I got her dancing, I made her see that rhythm comes from many things, not just music.”

At Handsworth Wood she has established a capitation allowance for bringing professional dancers to the school and moves mountains to take her girls to see dance live in theatres.

“It’s hard work. I have to write letters home for permission because a lot of them go to the mosque. But I think these pupils are entitled to see live performances. They can press video buttons but live performance is denied them.

“At first they are overwhelmed or embarrassed and often comment out loud. During a performance one teacher from another school came and said to me ‘do you know your pupils are making comments?’, and I said ‘Yes, I know, but this is the first time they’ve ever been to a live performance’.

“I plan, I work hard, I won’t compromise. I hope to nurture an interest so that as young women they will encourage others, so that as mothers they will take their children to dance classes. In that way it’s not always left to the school to give an entitlement.”

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