The academic year of 2020-2021 was characterized by multiple crises, which affected the pedagogical-artistic management of the Department of Dance at the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts – one of the leading colleges in Israel for training teachers of dance. These crises occurred on three levels: the global, the national, and the local. On a global level, the Covid-19 outbreak brought about limitations imposed upon the public, from which emerged extreme social tensions, coupled with a political chasm that led to four election cycles, and finally a controversial military operation on the national level. On a local level, additional challenges included the department's shift to a new location in the city center, integration into a new "Faculty" organizational framework, a six-week lecturers' strike, and the replacement of two of the five administrative-staff members. These extreme conditions increased the number of secondary roles as an integral part of the Head of the Department's function described as fortune-teller, ombudswoman, clerk, real-estate agent, stunt artist, and midwife. The article focuses on presenting each of these roles and the transition from VUCA 1 (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity/Chaos, Ambiguity) to VUCA 2 (Vision, Understanding, Courage, Adaptability).
The notion of Shared Literacies describes a process in which specialization in two separate domains merge to generate an opportunity for a new kind of knowledge to evolve. The paper presents a study where "movement literacy" (expertise in the field of dance in both theoretical and practical aspects) meets "graphic-symbolic literacy" (expertise in the creation and decoding of graphic-symbolic representations of any kind of knowledge). The theoretical background contains an overview of the two kinds of literacy, as well as two pertinent pedagogical ideas: the ability to translate information between different modes of representation; and self-generation of representations, an idea which emphasizes the independent design of symbols by learners. Both are tools for constructing a deeper understanding of a given phenomenon. The Shared Literacies' products are independently developed graphic-symbolic representations for dance movements, which emerged through a designated methodology. These reveal new aspects of the participants' insights: in the field of movement, learners became aware of its various aspects, including the ability to analyze, think of and conceptualize the components of bodily movement; in the field of symbolic representation, participants improved their abilities to manage multifaceted information about a phenomenon, using symbolic knowledge already at hand, as well as developing new representational means. The study demonstrates the power of Shared Literacies -the integration between different artistic and general fields of thought -as a novel approach for education in the Arts.
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