Off The Paper And Into The Dance: Investigating Preservice Elementary Teachers' Experiences With Dynamic Spatial Reasoning Choreography Tasks

This study aimed to empirically investigate preservice teachers' learning experiences during a series of geometry-themed choreography and dance activities. These pedagogical tasks were designed to examine the challenges and solutions that participants experienced when exercising their spatial reasoning abilities, particularly during the transition between the choreography designs they had generated on a Lego-based grid worksheet and real-world dancing positions. The data collection for this study took place at an elementary school located within a bilingual metropolitan area along the southwestern United States border. The overall findings indicated that all of the participating preservice teachers' dance teams encountered interrelated challenges, most of which were variations on disorientation, primarily due to transitioning between representations of space and the deprivation of the typically employed spatial navigation reference points that are used in normal activities.