Change your Teaching Stance: The Strategy of Sway (or, Dance Like Everyone’s Watching)

Learn to shed discomforts, stretch your limits, and bring an embodied experience back into your teaching stance (post COVID of course). Participants will be invited to explore the affective learning domain through sound, energy and movement. First, we will situate the evidence for using physical space and tuning into how rhythm can affect teaching and learning to influence energy and community within the classroom; next, we’ll interrogate how different sounds and movements make us feel; then participants will choose an energizing anthem they could use to amp up their classroom dynamic; and finally, we’ll put it together as a take-away artefact, so participants are ready to employ movement and music as part of their instructional repertoire going forward. 

Kara Loy’s career has evolved from foundations in the humanities, liberal and fine arts to more recent work in educational development at the University of Calgary. Her areas of specialization are undergraduate research, experiential learning, as well, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. She holds an interdisciplinary Master of Education degree with specializations in E-learning and bilingual education from the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary (2016), and, from the University of Saskatchewan, a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities (High Honours with Distinction in English, 2006), a postgraduate teaching certificate in English as a Subsequent Language (CERTESL, 2005), and a Bachelor of Liberal Arts Degree in Spanish (1998). She is currently a doctoral candidate in educational leadership researching how professors enact change leadership in Canadian higher education. Since 2019 she has served as an elected councillor for the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR). 

Leave a Reply