Dance Education - Adding Writing to Your Dance Curriculum as an Expressive Process

Writing about traumatic or stressful experiences has been shown to have physicaland mental health benefits. This book describes two studies that weredesigned to test the hypothesis that programmed writing would enhance themood health and dance skill of students enrolled in dance education classes.Study 1 included 40 participants with a mean age of 17.1 years who were enrolledin a community-based summer dance camp. Study 2 included 100 participantswith a mean age of 20.5 years who were enrolled in university-baseddance education classes. Both studies utilized a pre/post design and participantswere randomly assigned to a programmed writing group or a controlwriting group. The programmed writing group was instructed to writeabout their thoughts and feelings about dance and the control writing groupwas instructed to write about what they learned in class that day. Participantsalso completed questionnaires about their mood health and perceiveddance skill and were rated by independent observers on dance skill and attitude.A series of multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) examined theeffects of programmed writing on mood health and dance skill. The resultsof Study 1 suggested that programmed writing had a positive effect onmood but failed to have a significant effect on health or dance skill. The resultsfor Study 2 suggested that programmed writing did not have a significanteffect on health mood or dance skill. These studies appear to be an appropriateapplication of programmed writing in an applied setting and callinto question the ability of programmed writing to effectively cause positivechanges in health mood and goal attainment as is typically reported in theliterature. Ideas for future research such as linguistic analysis of participants'journals and further clarification of the role of stress and emotionality indance are discussed.