Ballroom Dance Club meets Wednesday nights and participates in outreach to teach others how to dance. Photo by Greg Clark.
Ballroom Dance Club goes back to high school to teach dance
The University of Rhode Island’s Ballroom Dance Club recently took a trip to the Greene School in West Greenwich to teach high school kids a selection of ballroom dance styles.
The team was contacted by the expeditionary learning school through teacher Lara Haggerty, a
The class is part of a variety of week long programs at Greene that are called intensives. The idea was developed in 2011.
“Intensives are a focused study on a topic that we don’t normally cover in our regular academic classes,” said Haggerty.
These topics can cover anything from carpentry to cooking to dancing.
The URI Ballroom Dance Team helped put this specific class into motion. They taught a group of about 25 students merengue, salsa and bachata. The students ranged from ninth to 12th grade, and came with all different levels of experience in dancing.
Due to these different levels of experience, finding a good teaching method was a little difficult. Nonetheless, the URI students were able to make sure everyone had fun.
“I always like sharing my love of dance with beginners,” Schein, a first-year doctor of pharmacy student said. “I like teaching too. I like teaching the basics to the people who want to learn. It brings a certain amount of joy to my life because I know dancing makes me feel really good and I hope it can make other people feel good as well.”
The dancing lessons were not the only part of the class. The students from the Greene school did research on how dancing affects their mental and physical state.
“Dance is a great way for people to work through depression… they couldn’t believe how it made them feel differently, and for the better,” Haggerty explained. “They found themselves asking ‘When are we going to dance [and] when are we going to move?’”
Timperley, a senior computer engineering major and Japanese minor, said he joined the ballroom dance club his freshman year. It was the first time he did ballroom dancing, he said.
“Social dancing is very fun, it was very different from the solo Irish step dancing I did,” Timperley said. “I met people and made friends. It was a very rewarding experience because of that.”
The students were exposed to the same experience. Additionally, URI’s ballroom dancing team was positively affected by the teaching. “It’s definitely nice to give back to the community… I felt really good about it,” Schein said.
As the new president, Schein is looking forward to advancing the club.
“I’d love to have more events like this,” she said “I want to expand the club. Dancing is a form of exercising, so I think it’s good for everyone’s mental and physical health.”
The students also got a little taste of the opportunity that awaited them outside of high school. They learned that there are clubs and organizations that focus on dancing as well as people who make dancing a large part of their life in college.
The Greene school wants their younger students to be able to receive this information very early in their high school careers, keeping them informed about different opportunities as well as a way to manage their mental and physical health.
“They actually did a little presentation to an elementary school, and they took what they learned from us, and then they showed the elementary kids how to do the salsa and they showed them how to dance a little bit,” Timperley said. “That was actually quite surprising, but impressive.”