Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education

7. Structuring Experience in the Classroom: Margaret H’Doubler Brings Dance to the University, 1917–1926

7 Structuring Experience in the Classroom Margaret H'Doubler Brings Dance to the University, I9I7-I926 A dance is the observable form of what the mind has created. Margaret H'Doubler, University of Wisconsin classroom handout, 1953 WHEN H'DoUBLER INSTITUTED THE NATION'S FIRST DANCE CLASS in higher education, she had watched a few dance classes, sampled a couple, and felt bolstered, ironically, by the fact that she herself had never really studied dance, much less performed it. Like her theatrical contemporary Isadora Duncan, H'Doubler as a dance teacher is both a mystery and a legend. The respective artistic and educational breakthroughs both women's work initiated are established, but precisely how that work looked remains vague.I Like dance, the performance of teaching essentially vanishes the instant it is created, and it was in the act of teaching, and in the quality of the studio climate she created, that H'Doubler's impact began. In effect, then, the dance education researcher 's challenge is to reconstruct a teaching "performance" that left behind few, if any, of the normal tangible artifacts of the performing arts, like critical reviews, essays, or photographs. In addition to dance, H'Doubler's classroom was also where the major themes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's health, freedom, physicality, and public image became visible as a curricular force. Here in the classroom, in the exchange between teacher and her female students, these emerging issues about social identity and women's efficacy 145 Structuring Experience in the Classroom would be richly explored; they were the subtext for what transpired in that dance studio high up in Lathrop Hall. That larger context having been examined, this chapter will focus on the more specific issues between teacher and student as a still point in a rapidly changing new world. The one aspect of H'Doubler's classes for which there is ample data is that of the educational transformation initiated in students. This transformation has been attested to by many of H'Doubler's students and colleagues in a general sense, while the step-by-step activities of an actual lesson remain elusive. As educator and psychologist Philip Jackson has noted, however, some of the most valuable educational exchanges involve "untaught lessons": We all at some level are convinced that teaching makes a difference, often a huge difference in students' lives.... Yet we often have a hard time convincing others of that fact. As a result when it comes time to talk about how effectively our schools are functioning or how well a particular group ofteachers are doing their job we seem to forget what we know from personal experience [emphasis added] and we wind up relying on evidence, such as achievement test scores, that completely ignores almost everything [meaningful] I have been talking about and alluding to here.' jackson's argument has particular importance in considering Margaret H'Doubler's classroom because, by her student's accounts, so much of her effective teaching happened outside of traditionally planned lessons and without producing test scores. Instead it crystallized in the individual experiences each student took away. While it is difficult to label them all "untaught lessons," because H'Doubler's planning customarily allowed for a certain amount of students' spontaneous responses to her initial instructions, much of what was learned was not part of an explicit lesson plan with anticipated outcomes. This is not to say that H'Doubler did not have a curriculum, because she most definitely did. She had a curriculum in the broad sense in which Elliot Eisner defines it, as a series of planned events with "some aim, purpose, goal or objective even though it might be highly diffuse or general ." H'Doubler practiced what Eisner and Dewey have called "flexible purposing," teaching by following what emerges in the classroom rather than by imposing a strict sequence of information to be transferred to the students) This chapter begins by looking at what Eisner calls "the operational curriculum," that is, what actually transpired in H'Doubler's classroom, but without the benefit of the live, direct classroom observation Eisner advocates. A relevant component to consider is the actual physical space of the dance studio-its appearance and ambience-as well as the special attire H'Doubler specified that her dance students wear. Additional 146 Structuring Experience in the Classroom aspects of this operational curriculum to be discussed are...