Creative Movement Research Articles

A Study on Gross Motor Skills of Preschool Children

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a creative movement program on gross motor skills of preschool children. Sixty children between the ages of 3 to 5 were drawn from the population of a preschool in Taichung, Taiwan. An experimental pretest-posttest control-group design was utilized. The children enrolled in the experimental group participated in a creative movement program twice a week for 30 minutes each time. Meanwhile, the children enrolled in the control group participated in unstructured free play. Data were collected from the administration of a pretest and posttest to both groups to investigate the effects of a creative movement program on the scores of the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-Second Edition (PDMS-2). Analysis of covariance was utilized to test four questions to investigate the effects of the creative movement program on gross motor skills. Results of this study showed that students participating in the creative movement program in gross motor skills (p < .05) scored significantly higher than those in the control group. There also was a higher significant difference in locomotion score (p < .05) on the PDMS-2 test in the experimental group than those in the control group. In addition, there was no significant difference in object manipulation (p > .05) and stationary (p > .05) scores on the PDMS-2 test between the two groups.

How the Emotional Climate (Field) Impacts Performance

Independently of the creativity movement, others have demonstrated the benefits of creating positive fields. I have reviewed a number of cases involving field below and added some from my own creativity experiences. I then explore the psychological explanation of why such fields are effective and go on to the findings of recent brain research, which not only reinforce the benefits of positive fields but also throw light on the difficulty of creating them. Finally, I offer some suggestions from my own experience of what can be done to create positive fields. I believe that this should now be the focus of our efforts: to the extent that we are successful, we should get the creativity and innovation we need as a by‐product.

Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from

Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from

The Effects of the Creative Movement Teaching Method and the Traditional Teaching Method on Elementary School Children's Self-esteem

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of two physical education teaching methods, the creative movement teaching method and the traditional teaching method, on self-esteem components. Specifically, the target of the study was to examine if the teaching of creative movement in physical education classes could influence a child's self-esteem. One hundred and seven (N=107) fifth and sixth grade children (aged 11-12 years) were used from an elementary school in Athens, Greece. Teaching methods were systematically applied for three months (24 teaching hours). The Self-Perception Profile for Children was used to measure children's self-esteem on two occasions, before and after the experimental conditions. A 2 2 2 (groups 2 pre-post measure) analysis showed a significant relationship between the five subscales (scholastic competence, social acceptance, athletic competence, physical appearance, and behavioral conduct) and an overall sense of self-worth (global self-worth). Both teaching methods should influence children's self-esteem from pre- to post-test. However, the teaching method of creative movement was most effective in improving the pupils' general self-esteem and also specific areas of self-esteem such as the cognitive, the social and the physical.

The Methods of Guidance for the Creative Movement of Young Children: Comparative Analysis of &ldquo;Movement Play&rdquo; and &ldquo;Imitation Play&rdquo;

The Methods of Guidance for the Creative Movement of Young Children: Comparative Analysis of &ldquo;Movement Play&rdquo; and &ldquo;Imitation Play&rdquo;

The Body can speak: essays on creative movement education with emphasis on dance and drama

The 19 contributors to this book attest that movement is our first language, our universal language. The book gives a voice to accomplished teachers, actors, dancers, directors, authors and choreographers who share their experiences while they address creative-movement education from pre-school through college. As editor of this collection, dancer, choreographer and artistic director Annelise Mertz, provides both an aesthetic appreciation for creative-movement education, as well as practical pedagogy for incorporating dance and drama into contemporary curriculum. Contributors include Becky Engler-Hicks, Ruth Grauert, Anna Halprin, Joanna G. Harris, Margaret N. H'Doubler, Michael Hoeye, Murray Louis, Annelise Mertz, Jaime Nisenbaum, Carol North, Jeff Rehg, Shirley Ririe, G. Hoffman Soto, Emma D. Sheehy, Harold Taylor, Branislav Tomich, Dorothy M. Vislocky and Joan J. Woodbury.

Hitting the right note with frogs

Caroline Gilderdale, early years arts consultant, City of York Council Arts Service, shows how to develop scientific awareness of the life cycle of a frog through creative movement and musical composition.

A Culture in Transition: Poor Reading and Writing Ability Among Children in South African Townships

Recent international studies shows that South African pupils compare most unfavourable with other countries with regard to literacy and numeracy development. In the present study our aim was to determine the presence of early childhood developmental factors that might play a role in the subsequent poor performance of these children. Children between the ages of five and a half and seven years from six daycare facilities in the informal settlement of Temba (South Africa) were randomly chosen. From each daycare facility, five children were chosen by means of the lottery method. The home language of all of the children was Tswana, one of the 11 official languages in South Africa. The reading and writing readiness checklist was used to gain insight into the reading and writing readiness of the sample group. The test was developed to determine the literacy level of prospective school beginners. Results indicate that these children are ill-prepared for formal education. They reveal inadequate literacy skill, poor sentence construction, poor sense of syntax, and inadequate sound development, and knowledge of the alphabet. They also reveal poor knowledge of sounds especially pertaining to prefixes and suffixes, transposition of sounds within words, and replacement of a sound within a word by another. These results point to a conglomerate pf factors, namely inadequate visual-motor integrative skills, poor visual analysis and synthesis, and poor fine motor development found in children who have been carried on their mothers' backs for excessively long periods (Pretorius et al. In Press). Additionally, they have also been inadequately exposured to mediated reading and writing experiences due to parental non-involvement. Cultural strengths of these black disadvantaged children include adequate gestalt formation, enjoyment of and ability in visual arts, responsiveness to the concrete, expressiveness of gestures and body language, enjoyment of and ability to learn at hand of pictorial and symbolic representations. They also excel in storytelling and singing, and enjoyment of and ability in creative movement, dance, music, and rhythm should therefore be implemented as medium of instruction in the foundational phase.

A paper with an interest in rhythm

This paper is a performative effort to move with and through the expressive and theoretical spaces of an interest in rhythm. This interest emerges initially from the middle of an encounter with the 5 Rhythms™, a contemporary somatic practice that uses rhythm to facilitate and catalyse expressive movement. Rather than seeking to excavate representational meaning from an encounter with the practice or using it to critically diagnose the corporeal politics of contemporary society, this paper apprehends the creative movement emerging from an encounter with/in the non-representational, performative potential of the 5 Rhythms™. By becoming a deliberately playful effort to hold onto the lines of movement emergent from the affective, kinaesthetic territories of this practice, the paper works to avoid either falling back upon a representational ethics that stops this movement dead in its tracks or becoming seduced by an aesthetics of weightless escape. This effort draws particular support from Deleuze and Guattari's writing on the refrain, a concept that provides a vehicle through which the lines of an interest in rhythm gain expressive and theoretical consistency. Because the territories of the refrain open onto lines of movement that are as much figural as discursive, the paper works to animate the lines of movement emerging from an encounter with the 5 Rhythms™ through a series of non-representational diagrammatic interventions. Finally, in drawing the diagrammatic lines of this movement in-between, the paper becomes not so much a series of lines about moving, but a series of lines moving about.

Creative Movement Therapy Benefits Children with Autism

Thirty‐eight children with autism were given movement therapy in small groups led by a trained movement therapist. After two months of biweekly sessions, the movement therapy versus the control (N = 38) children spent less time wandering, more time showing on‐task behavior, less time showing negative responses to being touched, and less time resisting the teacher.

The Dance on Paper: The effect of notation-use on learning and development in dance

This paper investigates the effect of movement notation on learning and development in dance. Specifically, if children read dance notation, as they would read a musical score, in what ways do their thinking in and about dance change, if at all? The study involves 96 children ages 8-9 who participated in an 8-week dance programme based on Labanotation. A control group was exposed to the new dance programme but not the extra notational intervention. The Assessment of Prime Actions in Creative Movement (APACM) was used to collect pre- and post-test data. Results indicate that putting the dance on paper helps young children learn how to recognize and understand dance when they see it. Dance instruction based on notation-use produced greater gains in recognition abilities, good integration of the recognition skills needed for development in dance, and early skill in performing movement.

Correction: The Africa Project: A Collaboration Between A Creative Movement Consultant, An Anthropologist, and An Art Educator

Correction: The Africa Project: A Collaboration Between A Creative Movement Consultant, An Anthropologist, and An Art Educator

Pattern of expanding consciousness in midlife women: creative movement and the narrative as modes of expression.

This study is based on Newman's theory of expanding consciousness; it expands Newman's method to include creative movement as a mode of expression. The researcher engaged in two in-depth interviews and one creative movement group experience with each of 17 midlife women. Results demonstrate expanding consciousness at midlife, with patterns of meaning identified in relationships with others, self, and spirit as well as challenges of loss, illness, and threats to relationships. Activities of consciousness were choosing, balancing, accepting, and letting go. Concepts of flow, turbulence, and a movement dialectic were identified in study findings. Creative movement supported self-awareness.

The Africa Project: A Collaboration between a Creative Movement Consultant, an Anthropologist, and an Art Educator

The Africa Project: A Collaboration between a Creative Movement Consultant, an Anthropologist, and an Art Educator

The Africa Project: A Collaboration between a Creative Movement Consultant, an Anthropologist, and an Art Educator

The Africa Project: A Collaboration between a Creative Movement Consultant, an Anthropologist, and an Art Educator

Re-criar a (na) renda de bilro: analisando a nova trama tecida

Arte e criatividade são temas que têm suscitado o interesse de muitos pesquisadores de diferentes orientações teórico-metodológicas e áreas do conhecimento. Visando a contribuir com o debate, é objetivo deste trabalho analisar o processo de criação/inovação em uma atividade específica, o fazer renda de bilro. As análises aqui apresentadas versam sobre o movimento de inserção de um sujeito na atividade rendeira na Ilha de Santa Catarina e foram tecidas a partir de suas próprias palavras. À luz dos aportes teóricos da Psicologia Histórico-Cultural, aspectos que singularizam tal sujeito constituíram-se como foco de análise, em especial aqueles relacionados ao movimento de criar nessa atividade.

Music Activity Preferences of Elementary Students

A questionnaire regarding music classroom activity preferences was administered to 2,251 kindergarten through fifth-grade students. Students stated whether they liked to participate in 13 traditional music-classroom activities and eight music-program-related activities, and they identified their favorite activity among six. Students preferred playing instruments above all other activities within and across grade levels, and 50% reported instrument playing as their favorite activity. Singing and listening were about equally liked within and across grades. Students preferred creative movement over dance within and across grades; first graders responded less positively to dance than to any other activity. Positive attitude toward composing declined with advancing grade level. Eighty-one percent liked to perform in music programs, and more than half liked to perform in small ensembles. Students responded very positively to attending concerts and having performers come to the classroom, but were less positive about participating in music contests.

The Theory of the Rain Forest Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity

Mexico's southeastern Maya movement offers one of the most advanced proposals in the construction of a theoretical and practical world alternative. It comes from the rain forest people's deepest convictions, simultaneously synthesizing western beliefs and ideas with those characteristic of the long struggles of resistance by the poor, discriminated and excluded of the earth. The many voices that spoke out at the Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, held in Chiapas from 27 July to 3 August 1996, reinforced the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's (EZLN) blueprint for universal democracy with justice, freedom, pluralism and dignity for all human beings, and joined in the emergence of a new way of thinking, feeling and acting. The originality of the theory of the Rain Forest is to be found in linking utopia, as a construct of the possible based on reality, with the construction of power derived from civil society. It is also a creative and historic movement that responds to the challenges of the 21st century with hope for the survival of humanity in dignity and justice.

The Rhythm of Life on the Amazon Floodplain: Seasonality and Sociality in a Riverine Village

This article explores the relationship between seasonality and sociality in a village of caboclos (Portuguese-speaking peasants of mixed descent) on the banks of the River Amazon. The aim is to revive Mauss's initial attempt to treat seasonality as intrinsic to the current and quality of social life, rather than simply as part of a framework of external environmental constraints. However, Mauss's argument was stuck in the contradictions generated by a strong nature/culture dichotomy. Contemporary dissolutions and revisions of this dichotomy provide the opportunity to return to Mauss. I shall argue that in the case of floodplain dwellers of the Brazilian Amazon, seasonality is constituted by the movements of people and the rhythmic structure of their social activities, which resonate with and respond to periodic changes in their floodplain environment. I conclude that this environment can be seen as work in motion, in which people's activities are a crucial part of that work, and seasonality is the periodicity of the creative movement itself. This article examines the seasonal rhythm of social life in a community of Portuguese-speaking floodplain dwellers (caboclos) on the River Amazon. My aim is to show that social life in this community has an intrinsic rhythmic character which is embodied in the history of practices and social relations in the environment. This undertaking is inspired by Mauss's brilliant study of the Eskimo (1979), in which he attempted to treat seasonality as inherent in the stream of social life rather than as part of a framework of external environmental constraints. My argument here is that the full force of this analysis has virtually been ignored in subsequent analyses of seasonality (see Evans-Pritchard 1940, for example), and in recent revisions and attempted dissolutions of the naturesociety dichotomy (see for example Croll & Parkin 1992; Descola & Palsson 1995). Like Mauss, I focus on a region where seasonality takes a pronounced and dramatic form. The floodplain of the Brazilian Amazon is a site of considerable economic, social and political importance in the area's history (Meggers 1971; Ross 1978). The middle reaches of the Amazon river (from Parintins to Santarem) are estimated to have a floodplain forty kilometres across. The variation in river height is about six to ten metres from wet to dry seasons. The whole area is more or less covered every flood, as it is an immense and flat landscape. These changes are not just visually dramatic, for they clearly have a profound influence on the ways in which people organize their annual activities.

Activation of hypoactive children with creative movement and dance in primary school

Activation of hypoactive children with creative movement and dance in primary school