For the better part of the past two school years, I have hosted a dance party during every single class period that I taught. As I reflect on this past school year, I am willing to say that co-curating dance parties with my students has been the single most transformative experience in my classroom. Through dance parties, I have been able to find, and spread joy in my classroom. Dance Party Island became THE place where we talked about music theory, rhythm, culture, history, consent, respect, love, fairness, joy, creativity, work etiquette, form and dare I say it? FUN! Dance Party Island helped me make our classroom into a safe space in where no matter how good or bad we have been, we gonna dance. Because dance, fun, physical activity and creating community, should not be a privilege,  they should be a given.

I started thinking about what I now call “Dance Party Island” while at MIT’s EduDesignShop conference in 2014. At the conference, I got to work with educators, policy makers, students and makers from all over the world. My cohort focused on brainstorming about ways of increasing student engagement inside the classroom. When it came time to present to our mentors, we talked about how cool would it be to create robots that would interact with students and co-teach small group instruction! We talked about designing apps that would become a bridge between YouTube, Google, Edutopia and The Magic Schoolbus. We talked about creating curricula that was 100% centered on what students wanted to learn as a community. All these ideas we were coming up with were truly amazing. And expensive! And time consuming. And expensive! And daunting.  And very, very expensive. The dreamer in me was so happy that I wanted to dance! The realist in me knew that I had to get on an overnight bus to teach and engage my students the next day.  As I was presenting on our findings, I added: “Dance parties! I would host daily dace parties with my students in where academics, fun and social emotional learning can come together!” The whole group laughed and giggled and danced to an imaginary song! 

Later that day, while schmoozing with all the mentors, I approached one of the mentors, a man who was head of K-12 educational research team at a major university. We talked bit about being white passing Latino men working in education in the USA as immigrants. He said that he liked the ideas I presented but that he was scared that because of kids having so much fun, things would get “out of control”. He asked what would I do if/when things got out of control during the fun dance parties. I am generally not the kind of person that is left speechless, but that moment I was. I thought about his fear and I told him, that I deeply believe that what we need to be afraid of as it concerns our students, is apathy and not fun. Apathy is our enemy. Fun and engaged students don’t cause the kind of ruckus that we can’t handle; they change the world. He looked at me and smiled and said, Touché. As I was processing his fears of the classroom falling apart during one of my dane parties, I imagined  a moshpit of rowdy kindergartners dancing and singing along to Raffi and destroying their textbooks.

To be honest, that scared me too. And then I also imagined the status quo; kids falling asleep, being judged and graded by their abilities or inabilities to sit still, quiet, criss-cross-apple-sauce, eyes on the speaker at all times, hands folded , mouth closed, brains turned on at all times, and that also seemed tenfold more scary. I am not saying that those things are not good practice, I think they are, for some of the time. I also think that through those expectations, we set students to fail because nobody can sit still, quiet and look at the speaker for six, eight or even twelve hours a day. I am a grown up, with masters degrees and tons of coping skills, and I cannot do that myself. I myself, need to move. I myself need to take breaks. I myself need to process information in different ways. I think it is unethical teaching to expect our students to be able to do things we cannot do ourselves, especially if those things are not developmentally appropriate.

During my bus ride back from Boston to New York City, I began thinking of musical activities I could do with my students during “Dance Party Island” and a real good rationale for my administration, so that in case they walked by my classroom and we were all “electric siding” around, I could tell them at the drop of a hat that we are learning abut sequencing and form and rhythmic juxtaposition and mathematical patterns and Depth of Knowledge charts ad Common Core State Standards.  The first two things that became clear were: 1) I would co-curate the song choices with my students and 2) “Dance Party Island” would become a ritual; meaning I would commit to doing it every single class period; no matter what.*

Here are some things I learned through “Dance Party Island”:

1. I learned to be vulnerable myself in front of my students. I am not a good dancer and although I am a percussionist by training, I think I move kinda awkwardly. Dancing is uncomfortable for me. If I am asking my students to be vulnerable around me and open up to try uncomfortable things, I better put my money (and feet) where my mouth is.
2. I learned that dancing is a great way to cleanse an environment. Whether the room is tense because of something that happened-and was dealt with-, or whether we just need an energizer, a short dance party can turn even the trickiest situations around.
3. I learned that experiences don’t have to be long or complicated, as long as they are intentional. The Whip/NaeNae lasts only 3 minutes and I cannot count how many times that  whipping and Nae-Naeing for three minutes was all we needed to remind ourselves that life and school are supposed to be fun.
4. I learned what we adults and teachers, have a misconception of the word fun. We think the words fun and funny as synonyms. Children don’t. An experience such as a dance party can be fun without being funny; which I think is what scares us. Funny=not serious=not worthy of our time=we are going to score low on our observations=we are going to get fired, etc. I strongly believe that what the world needs most right now, is people having fun in whatever it is that they do. When we get fulfillment out of our experiences, we are more engaged, produced better quality work and we are happier than when we are not. Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about a version of this, in what he describes as the Concept of Flow.
5. I learned that some adults are hesitant to free or unstructured play for students not because of what the experience will be for the students but because of what the experience will be for the adults. “What about if so and so gets hurt dancing? Who will clean the spilled paint? What will my principal say? This is too loud and I have a headache. “I am tired.” These are all things I have either heard my teacher peers say, or that I said myself!
6. I learned that I don’t know nearly enough about music and genres and styles and cultures and dance moves and song lyrics.
7. I learned that every experience can and must be designed, introduced and scaffolded through the lens of social emotional learning. No matter how silly the experience, such of a dance party, we can and must design ways for our students to develop socially and emotionally. Dance Parties are amazing platforms for interpersonal interactions as well as interpersonal discovery and growth.
8. I leaned that there are power imbalances within my classroom that I did not think they were. I learned that I still need to and would like to figure out more ways to still oversee and facilitate an experience without dictating and or controlling it. I learned that the world of critical pedagogy must transcend one-off lessons and must come alive inside and outside my classroom. at all times. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire speaks about this in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “No one educates anyone else nor we educate ourselves, we educate each other in communion in the context of living in this world”
9. I learned that I would like to find more opportunities to freely rejoice through sound and movement, in dance parties in my own life.
10. I learned that it is not through me; the teacher, but through the work of musiquing in ways that are conducive of fun, that students feel empowered, engaged and in charge of their own experiences, as individuals and as a community.

Here are some things I taught my students through “Dance Party Island”:

1. I taught my students that no matter what, our bodies and our words are not and will not be used as weapons of oppression. Not today, not ever. We will strive to dance in ways that are safe physically and emotionally. We will be gentle with each other when holding hands and we won’t make fun or pressure each other. We will help one another be all what we can be and through this practice, we will become vehicles for peace in our own communities.
2. I taught my students that our bodies belong to us, and it is our own human right to feel respected and to respect each other’s wants/needs. I taught my students that should they want physical contact with another student, there are different kinds of touch that are appropriate and that we must first ask if the prospective recipient would like one of those; such as a high five, a handshake, a hug or a partner dance holding hands. If the prospective recipient says yes, then we might proceed. If they say no, we won’t the that as a personal attack. Instead we will thank them for being  empowered to tell us what they want/need.
3. I taught my students that we are a community and as such, we sometimes must come together in doing different kinds of jobs to achieve a common goal. Sometimes, we might not want to do those jobs. In those times, we will have conversations about it but sometimes those conversations will have to happen at an appropriate time, and that might have to be after the job is done. These times will require that you; my students, trust that I as your teacher would never ask you to do something that would hurt you.
4. I taught my students that what they love is worthy of loving and that I, am interested in and eager to know about it. Co-curating dance party song mixes taught my students that their voice is important and so are the other ones in our community. Co-curating mixes taught my students that it is more than OK to dance along to the Black Eyed Peas one day and to the Theme of Sonic the Hedgehog another day and to Beyonce the next day and to John Lennon the following one; as long as the songs where picked by a community member that loved those songs.
5. I taught my students that music happens in real time and in that real time we make patterns together and we combine beats and notes and rests and we then sometimes can use different kinds of signs to write our patterns down so that we don’t forget the music, and sometimes we don’t need to write stuff down and sometimes, if we are lucky, we come up with stuff that is so good that we can’t write it down because it is magic. And then as an exemplar I show them “I Feel Good” by James Brown and tell them that although we could write the notes down, we can’t really write the vibe down.
6. I taught my students that our elders came up with some incredible music and that music is so good we must study it so that we too can come up with awesome stuff! So, we listen to and dance to Bill Withers, and P-Funk and Miles Davis. I tell them that their elders’ elders came up with amazing music too; which our elders studied. So we listen to and dance to Louis Armstrong,  Big Mama Thornton and Bill Monroe. In addition, other cultures from around the world also came up with some real good music and the more we know about that music, the more we’ll be able to understand the world. So, we listen to and dance to Fania Allstars and Fela Kuti and Mariachi Sol De Mexico. As we study and dance to the musics of our culture and the music of other cultures, we get to see parallels and ultimately we get to connect the dots and see that we truly have more things in common than differences with one another. I know it sounds cliche and corny, but I pinky promise; it is true!
7. I taught my students that in co-curating a mixtape together, they are the very fabric that makes up the quilt that makes up our community. Without their input, we have nothing to dance to. That lesson transcends the dance floor and goes into class discussions, problem solving and even classroom management. By holding space for, and designing curriculum that allows my students to see themselves reflected in, I have been able to create safe spaces for teaching and learning. I have found that these spaces empower us all to be the teachers and the learners.
8. I taught my students that the more we learn about the building blocks of music as an artform; rhythm,melody,harmony,history, literacy et all, the richer our dance parties can be. It can be very fun to jam along to our dance parties with synchronized body percussion compositions, or to sing along our favorite songs in harmony.
9. I taught my students that fun, joy, happiness love,kinship, community, safety and care.  are things they deserve. They should expect to receive and to give all of those things while in school. Although dance Parties cannot provide all of those things all the time, I have found that hosting dance parties together, can surely help us get closer to a few of those things some of the time. And sometimes, that is enough!
10. The most important I taught my students through hosting daily dance parties, is that I said I would do something and I did it. I kept my word. It was a simple thing that showed my students that say what I mean, and that I mean what I say.  Within a few weeks, dance parties became a ritual. The students expected them, they looked forward to them.                                

As time passed and I learned more about how to optimize dance parties for better academic and social emotional instruction, I realized that I could treat dance parties in a very modular way; fitting them where they were best needed inside my lesson. If I felt like we needed a way to start in a focused way, we started our classes with a dance party. If I thought that we needed some calming redirection, we would have a tiny,silent dance party, if we needed to let loose, we’d rock out as loud as we cold jumping as high as we could and if we just wanted to have a good time because heaven’s forbid, kids should have fun in school, we’d just put on MJ and moon danced for five minutes. The point is that I said we’d have a dance party in every class and we did. That translated into Mr. Martini keeps his word. That translated into this is a safe space for trust.       Dancing is not a reward or a punishment. It is something we do as a community. We celebrate through dance parties AND we heal and engage in restorative justice as a community through dance parties.

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* There have been a few class periods in which I have cancelled “Dance Party Island”. There haven’t been that many, but they did happen nonetheless. The truth of the matter is that sometimes life happens! All the times I cancelled a dance party, I did because it would have been weird to have a dance party. I think first and foremost we as educators need to be responsive to our students and their needs in the moment. The few times where we cancelled the dance parties, we talked about why we cancelled the parties and we processed and reflected on that experience too.