Entanglements of dance/poetry: Creative dance in students’ poetry reading and writing

This study explored the pedagogical implications of integrating creative dance into fifth-grade students’ poetry reading and writing within the context of an educational design research project. Two teaching designs were developed and implemented by a researcher, a dance teaching artist, and two primary school teachers during two research cycles (the academic year of 2018–2019). Thinking with new materialism, a diffractive analysis was used to identify performative agents that make a difference in students’ meaning-making processes. When dance was integrated, it became entangled with the poetry in students’ meaning-making processes. The boundaries between reading, writing, and dancing became fluid, enhancing the attention to the materiality, relationality, and embodiment of the students’ reading and writing processes. These results demonstrate that dance integration has the pedagogical potential to deepen and broaden the meaning-making in poetry reading and writing. This article therefore concludes by presenting some recommendations for how to integrate creative dance into first language and literature education.