(soft upbeat music) - I wanna have dance at school everyday.

- We are training middle school dancers and high school dancers to be dance mentors working with elementary school students.

So, we go in, we are responsible for working with all of these students, creating dances with them, creating dances ourselves.

We have two performances, so we're gonna have pretty high standards for you all.

- I love that you're almost not you when you're dancing.

You can let all your emotions out and you can take off your mask.

- Now when I go to parties, I can dance.

I can actually dance.

- It just makes me feel happy for this every time that I'm dancing.

- I'm really glad that I'm able to bring dance to people who've never danced before and show them that dance is for everybody.

- A lot of kids don't have practice using their bodies to say anything.

If they're expressing any kind of thought, it's either in writing or it's speaking.

And the idea, the concept of using your body to communicate ideas, I think is totally novel for a lot of kids.

- [Woman] I'm just seeing them become bigger people.

- They gain empathy and compassion.

You can't teach that, but you have to give an opportunity, an environment for that to happen.

And then for that to happen through the vehicle of dance is just even beyond, it's beyond.

(upbeat music) My name is Ann Biddle.

I am the director of the DEL PVPA program.

I am also the founding faculty of the Dance Education Laboratory program in New York City.

The Dance Education Laboratory, otherwise known as DEL is a professional development program that provides an inclusive and dynamic laboratory for dance educators to develop and hone their teaching skills.

DEL focuses on the artistry of teaching and inspires educators to teach from the heart.

I was the founding faculty when DEL was established in New York City in 1995.

Over 25 years later, DEL continues to nurture innovative and high quality teacher training and offers dance educators a comprehensive model of dance education.

I have adapted this adult learning model for my middle and high school students at PVPA.

They receive the same training and gain the same skills as our dance professionals.

It's a mammoth challenge, yet we are able to prepare them to teach dance in the elementary school classroom in five intense training days.

So first thing that's so important to teach your students, these are really important.

These are the four basic shapes of all human movement.

Show me a round shape with your hands, just with your hands.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Just with your hands.

LMA is the language of dance or the vocabulary of dance.

Body, what moves, effort, how do you move?

The qualities of movement.

Space, where do you move?

And relationship, with whom are you moving?

(light music) Up on the middle level.

This is middle level.

This is middle level.

Ooh, that's a little high.

Can you go a little lower?

Yes, thank you so much.

- Side to side.

One more time.

This time let's try to point our feet.

I'm Janavia, I'm a senior and I've been doing DEL since I was in seventh grade.

- All right, everyone hands out.

We're gonna be spiders.

So with your little spider fingers, you're gonna crawl out really quickly.

My name is Tali Sureck and I'm in 12th grade at PVPA.

- In and up.

Brush them down and up.

Open wide shape and brush them down and up.

I'm Tiana Vaszquez-Ford, and I'm a DEL TA.

Take a different colored paint.

Mine's purple and we're gonna brush it all the way down and up and wide shape.

- Can you make a shape where you're as close to the ground as you possibly can?

I'm Yoshi, I'm 16, and I go to PVPA and I'm in 11th grade.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

(light music) So the DEL training is super intense.

It requires a lot of effort from everyone.

And it's going over all of the different units that we teach with the third, fourth, and fifth graders.

So three units going over how to work with your team, building that bond with your team.

It's crazy how much growth you go through.

- Faster faster faster.

Don't think, just do it.

Change levels.

It's a beautiful, long story.

And this is the book that we're gonna be focused on for our third grade dance unit when we go to the Leed school.

"Grandma Spider Brings the Sun" written by Geri Keams and illustrated by James Bernardin is a Cherokee creation folk tale.

It is brimming with movement words and offers wonderful lessons about overcoming adversity, working together and respecting the natural world.

The story also has some great characters such as the egotistical buzzards in the fierce sun guards.

This was a perfect entry point for the third grade curriculum.

(student chatter) The choreographic process is kind of laid out in steps or here's how we organize our ideas and students are brought through that, but in a very collaborative way.

So the dance becomes something that everyone has worked on.

- I have an idea.

So what if we darted in the regular shape, kinda like darting from side to side, like running.

So stomping can be from the beginning and then the dart could be during the regular shape.

- [Laura] That is something that we strive for in our academic disciplines as well.

We want students to be engaging in dialogue about ideas.

We want them to be problem solving and thinking about what is it that makes this math problem work or not work?

Like that's something that's part of the progressive educational model.

- Jump into the center and then we're on a low level.

And then everyone else on the outside, we're doing something on a high level, maybe like circling around.

So I think that's cool cause it shows how it's like we're trying to protect something.

And this is like a circle, sun-like shape.

And we are kind of like here.

So like on a low level.

And do you wanna be like circling around?

Yeah that's kind of cool.

That looks like the sun.

(dramatic music) - And this poem is called "Life Doesn't Frighten Me".

It's a poem written by Maya Angelou and the paintings are by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I want you to start to listen for all the movement words, and also look for the movement in the illustrations.

One of my goals for this curriculum was to break down gender norms in dance.

And so I carefully selected a theme that would generate dynamic movement vocabulary and feel empowering for all students.

The evocative images in "Life Doesn't Frighten Me" was perfect for engaging fourth graders.

So sometimes going forward, sometimes we're retreating.

I felt it was important for all students to know the poetry of Maya Angelou.

As an African American poet, writer, and civil rights activist, Angelou is one of the most powerful poetic voices of my generation.

Her words are potent yet accessible and inspire courage, perseverance and hope.

Coupled with the vibrant illustrations of Basquiat, "Life Doesn't Frighten Me" was the perfect vehicle for meaningful dance making with our fourth graders.

You now, in your groups, you have one page from the book.

You're gonna look at that page and you're gonna follow the choreographic package.

This is what you're gonna be doing with your fourth graders.

Exactly this task.

Students begin their dance making process by creating a movement sentence.

A movement sentence is a combination of two or more action words placed in a sequence such as skip, turn, leap.

Students explore many variations of each action word as they collaboratively build dances that go beyond just stringing steps together.

Students get to interpret their movement sentences in very individualized ways, which gives them a feeling of ownership and creative agency.

Because the language of LMA is accessible to all students, it's a great framework that supports literacy and helps develop a common movement vocabulary.

We have also adapted the movement sentence concept to create large multi-generational community based dance events that we call movement sentence choirs inspired by the choreography of Rudolph Laban and linked to a social theme.

A movement sentence is a powerful tool that proves to the students that they can make a dance about anything.

- I feel like we got a pretty good list of action words.

So now we have to create our movement sentence.

So we wanna pick four that can like go good with each other.

We probably want one that can like open it.

We can have some like ones that move probably here.

- I like dodge.

- I like dodge too.

- Maybe somewhere in the middle.

- Like here or here.

We should be crawling around.

And with dodging, like really play with levels.

Like if someone goes like that, you go like.

So I started DEL when I was in seventh grade and I was really awkward and just very shy and nervous.

- Oh, Tali was painfully shy.

Every report card that came home was it's wonderful to have Tali in class.

She's hardworking, very organized.

She just doesn't speak.

- Kids who are shy are often just not seen as people who can be leaders.

So in seventh grade, and before that, I thought that's just how it was, like I was gonna be given roles that were a little bit less vocal.

I had never been offered a leadership role like this before.

And I was with other people so different from myself, but we were starting together from the very basics.

And now to the most advanced.

It might be cool if like, you know, when you get to this corner, you're like starting to hide again.

And then you do a really big like stomp or something.

And like that makes us react.

Often people think of leaders as just being bossy or loud or controlling a situation.

But at DEL it's really about being in control together, working with each other.

(applause) - Here we go.

Eight count.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, step.

In the center.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, to the left.

Here we go.

Four counts.

- The reason we chose hip hop is because we felt that developmentally the fifth graders were ready for a genre.

Shakia was working with me and that's her area of expertise.

So I said, Shakia, how can we create a hip hop curriculum that uses the DEL model?

- [Shakia] Up down lock, up down lock.

- [Ann] And so the first day of our fifth grade dance residency, we made sure to provide a historical foundation of the roots of hip hop dance linked to the African diaspora.

- Rock your body, both arms.

Freestyle has always been a part of hip hop and I really wanted to dig deeper into it and have the students dig deeper into it and feel more comfortable.

And this was the perfect way to do so because the repetition of the moves, once they have the foundation and the basics down, they're able to put their own spin onto it and bring their own selves out and be unique and be themselves.

And that's what's really important.

- When I first thought about doing DEL, Ann talked to me, she told me about it and I was super nervous because I just kind of thought I wasn't the person to teach other people because I thought myself, there's not a lot that I know.

So I gave it a chance and within doing it with the students, every day was a new learning process for me.

And every day I had like my different challenges that I worked to improve on.

And this is my last year back and I'm really excited about it.

And I'm also super sad about it at the same time, but I'm really excited for the new students.

- And back, forward, back, to the front and make sure you bounce, get low.

It's really fun.

They're really all excited to learn and teach.

So it's really awesome to have their positivity.

How low can you go?

- The different breakdowns in the categories, body style, effort, the different dynamics really make the choreography unique, the space, the way they move, it's completely different now that we add the dynamics of the DEL pedagogy in there.

- How low can you pace?

How high can you pace?

Can you pace with two arms?

- [Ann] So Yoshi, what are we doing right now?

- Heading over to Mt.

Holyoke college for the filming of the catalyst pieces that we're sending to the national high school dance festival.

(light music) - [Felice] Just let it float Megan, like you're floating.

- Should we like space it from the beginning?

- Let's go at the beginning.

We are doing the DEL work at, it's just a higher level.

Catalyst is a choreography company.

That's really our whole, that's really the basis of the work we do as a student choreography company.

And so when we start our work in class, it's like, what's this dance about?

And how are you gonna make it?

And how do you translate that concept into a physical idea?

I like to step way back for a little while.

They often will turn to me after every run and say, do you have any ideas?

And I like to just say not yet.

Most of the time their ideas surprise me.

And so by the time we get to Mount Holyoke to get to this performance space, more than anything, my hope is that they're just feeling really ready to say this is my work and to step into the space and I wanna be behind, you know, I wanna be a step away.

(soft music) - [Janavia] If you were to ask me a middle school, if I ever thought I'd choreograph a piece, I'd probably say no.

- I didn't know she had it in her until they said we were gonna have like a talent show or whatever.

So they did like a talent show and she did like a solo and me and my mom and my sister, we were like, oh my goodness.

We did not know she could do all that.

And that's what she's been doing ever since.

And she loves it.

- [Janavia] I believe that DEL brought out the more choreographic process in me and was a big step for helping me find more of my own artistic ability and finding kind of like the inner voice of my ideas and exploring more serious topics.

- She wants to be a doctor, but I feel like she's having all these amazing opportunities, I think this is her calling.

I really feel like that.

So it's up to her, but I feel like this is something that she should go far with.

- Yes!

(applause) You happy?

- Yeah.

- You wanna say anything?

- Good job.

- Good, she's happy, it was great.

(upbeat music) So team leaders, you have some really clear directions, what you need to review with your whole team.

Shakia, Felice and I are here to help if you have questions, but we really want you to take on this leadership role right now to be really clear with helping prepare your team for tomorrow.

Start the process of reviewing.

- Every year that I've done this, we, us as teachers, we're like, oh my goodness.

They're just not there yet.

And there's just so much more that we can teach them.

- The idea of leadership for some students is really comfortable.

It just is natural to stand up and take the lead, to stand in the front, to lead the class.

You see it come out in all different ways.

And for some students it's not as natural.

And it just is nerve wracking to think what if I messed up?

What if I say the wrong thing?

I think we're trying to encourage them to lean on each other in that way, step up when it's time to step up, let someone help you when they need to be helped.

- Like, oh, we wanna jump in.

We wanna take over because we're so used to being in that role.

So now we have to really have patience and we have to let them do it.

We have to let them do it and then they're gonna make mistakes and they're gonna figure that out and it goes on.

So we're gonna have a really wonderful time tomorrow.

Make sure you get a good night's sleep, eat a big dinner, have a good breakfast, make sure you're wearing your dance clothing.

So gently roll over onto one side, take your time.

And this is exactly what we will do with our students.

And slowly, slowly, slowly come up to position four.

Slowly, slowly, slowly.

(soft music) (students chatting) - Okay.

We're older than them.

They're gonna think whatever we do if we mess up is amazing.

They're gonna be like, whoa!

- Which is hard for us.

Cause we wanna take over, but we don't take over.

I'm a hundred percent confident they will be awesome.

Everyone feeling okay?

- And then Elizabeth, you're gonna read the poem out loud.

Emily, and you're doing the positions, right?

(light music) (students chatting) (soft music) - Okay, Ashley, take off your socks.

Their socks are all off.

So take off your socks.

Since we're teaching dance, I wanna learn your name with a movement.

So I'm gonna say my name and I'm gonna do a small little movement with it.

And then you're gonna repeat my name and the movement.

So I'm gonna go Tali and then everyone else repeats.

- [All] Tali.

Now your turn.

- Jada.

- [All] Jada.

- How about something with your arms out?

Okay.

(kids chatting) - I think any time you get to see a child in a different way increases your understanding of the child, it's a cool way to observe them.

And so then I can incorporate those things that I see in the DEL program into the classroom.

- [Tali] Now you're gonna take your hands and put them in favorite color paint.

- Well, it's really fun.

When I was younger, I saw people dancing and I found that it was like a way to express your moods.

And when I found out that you could give that gift to others, I thought that was the thing I wanted to do.

- Up, down, lock.

Up, down, lock.

Up, down, lock.

Up, down lock.

That's definitely a shift because you really have to just trust yourself.

And that's something that's often hard to do from being like, okay, I know this program, I know how this works, I have other people if I forget, and just sort of being able to go with the flow.

So it's a lot more like you have to trust yourself than I had to do in the past.

Two, three, four.

Switch.

(upbeat music) Switch.

Switch.

- Now we're gonna be doing the prep.

Put your arms like this.

You wanna go like this.

I always just wanted to come here for my art skills, like drawing and dancing, I didn't know if I was good it or not.

So I wanted to try that out.

- [Tali] Other side.

- I like about it is I've seen all the grades above me do it.

And I'm kind of excited for that to finally do it.

- Bending our legs, bending our legs.

Side up, side up, then we're doing the Humpty dump, who remembers that?

DEL creates this form of leadership where everybody's really just working together and everybody's growing together.

Five, six, seven, eight.

How slow can we hitchhike?

(upbeat music) Can we hitchhike into a big line across here with me being the leader?

It's nice because you know, fifth graders are so painfully self-conscious.

This is such a breakthrough for them to have to do a little solo.

- What was the first thing we did, we sat together?

And what did we do?

- Mirror.

- Mirror.

Do you remember?

I have spent most of my career with like middle and high school students.

And I think for most of my career, I thought I could never work with young kids.

I don't know the strategies.

I don't know how it works.

So last year was the first year that I had done the spring course and we were working with second graders and I just fell in love with like the way that they respond to the prompts or to the ideas or to the movement questions that we asked them.

I just fell in love with that sense of complete freedom, no inhibitions, just trying things out.

And so that is really fun to see.

Being at Leeds is even more exciting because you're seeing a school where they do it three years in a row.

And so third graders are so excited and open and then the fourth graders have this sense of like, yeah, we've been here before and the fifth graders are like veterans and like, everything is like, yeah, we got this, it's all good.

- And they just look at them in awe like, wow, this is something I might wanna do when I go into junior high and high school and just something to look forward to every year.

- It's exciting because we don't sit at a desk all day and they're just really nice.

When school work is happening, it can get a bit boring I have to admit.

Like, I'm fine with the schoolwork.

I can just like fly right through it.

But it just gets a bit boring after a while and DEL, there's just always something new.

So it's fun.

- Other years it's very flowy.

And in third grade it was fun.

Fourth grade, it was fun, but now, I'm ready for something different.

And I feel like they know that.

And so now we're doing hip hop.

It's really fun to do because it's just a break from our regular school day.

- It's not like math where I'm just learning, reviewing, and getting to learn something new that I haven't learned before.

- [Ann] The new DEL mentors, you wanna be encouraging them because what starts to happen is you're gonna give them more leadership.

And so every day we give them something else to think about, the team leaders keep getting challenged to go to the next level of leadership.

So the next level of leadership is lifting up the rest of their team members.

- I had to get to know everybody on a more personal level because I feel knowing someone personally can help form a bond with the group that can show when you're teaching the students.

So it's really helpful to know that.

- I knew a couple people in my group before, but I didn't know much of anyone else.

I saw a lot of other people like on my school bus in the morning, like I see them around school, but I never really talk to them.

And it's awesome to form a new relationship through DEL and it's like awesome to meet new people.

- So after you do that, brainstorm on both of your lessons, you wanna explain we're what we're doing is that we're making a movement sentence.

What is a movement sentence?

And then the next step in terms of the lesson planning and the classroom teaching is starting to go through that arc of our whole choreographic unit, just goes like we were doing in the training, just goes like that.

So our job today is we as a whole class are gonna come up with some action words based off of this picture and this picture reads "dragons breathing flames on my counterpane.

That doesn't frighten me at all."

- Stomp.

- Oh, good one.

- Yes.

Run.

- You had one.

So there are a lot of strengths from DEL coming into Leeds.

A major part of that strength is that the culture has changed.

There's the admission that dance is a discipline for one and that it's given credence rather than kids are moving all over the place, can't you sit still?

Kids who are moving need to move and they may be incredible dancers on stage in just a few years and has given kids a lot of confidence.

(light music) - Nice, good.

Using your arms, using your legs.

- Just like a flower blossom.

Can you blossom very slow?

- Very nice.

- Can we blossom very low?

I really love how you're blossoming.

What's your name?

- Rosie.

- Rosie, can you show us how you're blossoming?

- Born to blossom like a rose.

- [Janavia] Perfect.

Perfect.

- I think the DEL program teaches them that there's other ways to communicate using your body, using physicality.

And that's really interesting to me to watch that happen.

- All right.

So last time we brainstormed all these action words, right?

And we hadn't made our movement sentence, so let's make it now.

My group, my mini group is all boys, which I think Mr. Foster did purposefully and they're great.

It's so fun to work with them.

How do you wanna start the dance with the stalking?

- The panthers walking around.

- I feel like I've been able to pull a lot out of some of them.

And even if that means giving them like special parts or taking their ideas and incorporating into the dance, because the littlest things make them feel incorporated and make them see how much fun it is.

This one boy named Jude who I can tell really takes to the whole DEL model, he has done such a great job at understanding what all these different elements are and almost taking like a mini leadership role in our group with helping me and Elizabeth directing his classmates.

- Our page in "Life Doesn't Frighten Me" is panthers in the park.

It's just like, it's just random.

Like whoever wants to do something and it all fits together.

You actually get to feel what the people in the book might feel.

- So nobody said over, how about under?

Between?

Yeah.

- I like that one.

- Think snakes slithering between small rocks.

- Maybe we could like make a bridge and people can go under.

- I've earned a new respect for elementary school teachers.

It takes a lot.

But I think when there's a bunch of people just staring at you trying to, and if you mess up, then they're gonna mess up.

So it's pressure.

But I think it's rewarding.

- Oh, I have an idea.

- We can do slides out first.

- Well first we have pacing.

- It'd be cool if we did slides out and then we paced.

- In fifth grade I had sort of a difficult group at first.

There's a lot of different personalities in one space.

- I have the opposite of writer's block.

It's not really writer's block when it comes to dancing, it's water in a river just coming, ideas nonstop, but they can't all fit into one dance.

So I have to shut my mouth sometimes and let other people do the talking and have ideas.

It's kind of hard sometimes.

- I don't know.

Maybe there's more room for everybody to have their piece in there where sometimes where they're having to come up with one idea, it's limited.

But in the DEL program, a lot of their ideas are incorporated.

So I think they all feel heard.

- First we kind of started out with the basic stuff, like deciding what moves we were gonna do.

Wrote it down and play a little bit and take some notes.

It's actually kind of fun and actually really cool that we get to add our own action words.

- It feels exciting because you get to make your own thing out of a poem.

- And it all kind of came together.

We decided as a group.

- I like working cause it's like all a big thing that's together.

Like not just one person doing all this stuff.

- I think I've learned to work well with some of the people that I haven't in the past and started to accept that, working with other people.

(soft music) - I don't really feel like anyone's judging you.

And I learned about my classmates and how I never realized so many people were good dancers.

- Our dance is almost complete.

- [Yoshi] Traditional dance teaching can sometimes be a little rigid because DEL, you can really find your individuality throughout it.

You can explore yourself as a dancer, as a choreographer, as a team member really.

- So the students who don't usually work together are able to work together and really work out the conflict within the dance and decide on different moves with the dance.

They're able to do that and they're able to compromise a lot better than they are academically.

(upbeat music) - And so we have two big performances next week and we have not created the dances and we have one day to create them.

So the beauty of the DEL model is we're using the exact structure that we use with the Leed students, but we're doing it in an accelerated way.

And we're making a giant sort of shadowy, scary group shape behind her.

(light music) And they're gonna make a group dance with their teams based on "Grandma Spider Brings the Sun" and then "Life Doesn't Frighten Me".

That's a really fun challenge.

- We pick a few action words that we think about in the page that we received to make the dance out of.

Like pounce and crawl and stalk, and really try to like make flowy moves out of them to make a dance.

- I love seeing the PVPA students rise to the rigorous challenge of creating original choreography in this collaborative way.

They get to feel this collective sense of purpose and teamwork.

It's really all about building community.

- Muscle muscle muscle, and then over.

Yes.

Yes.

I wanna feel the emotion.

Thank you.

- It's opened up a whole new opportunity for like, you know, putting this on resumes and stuff like that.

And it's really helpful because maybe I was thinking about maybe opening a dance studio of my own one day to teach other kids about dance.

And this is really helpful to start that.

I'm super excited and this has been like an awesome opportunity for me.

And I just love dancing and dancing with other people.

And this is just amazing.

I'm so happy to be here.

(upbeat music) (students chatting) - So today is the day, finish everything, go right in, do the warm up, go right to your groups.

Review, try to finish your dances.

You can do it.

Yes?

Good.

Let's tape the space.

(soft music) For most of the classes, this is the first time they're able to practice on the stage.

And so they're going from a teeny tiny little cramped classroom with desks and all kinds of stuff to this beautiful stage that we have.

It's a little crazy because we don't have a lot of time, but I think it's going really, really well.

I'm feeling great about it.

- They're all done.

But now it's putting it to music and making sure that we're on rhythm.

So the hard part, it will be for the DEL mentors because they'll have to choose the song.

And then from there, they'll just have to keep rehearsing to the music.

I gave them some really positive feedback and they took it and I was really surprised because I thought it was gonna be choppy, but it was really smooth.

Like they all did exactly what I was looking for.

And they were so happy doing it.

There was smiles and they're like Humpty dumps and you know, they kept the bouncing and they had a great time.

(upbeat music) - I really like the stomping part.

I just felt so like in the music and in the mood, like tingles up my spine.

- Me too.

Oh my goodness.

Poke out your chest a little bit more.

Because that was so powerful.

That was, you were right on.

That was the most powerful part.

They remember the dances so well, like more than me, they're like do this, this is the next thing.

So they remembered it.

So that's good.

- Their leadership skills are right at the max right now because they have to be in charge of their group, their choreographers.

They have to be working with their team leaders.

They have to remember this complicated sequence.

- Yeah, I think a lot of people have been smiling at the rehearsals and stuff for the performance.

I normally don't dance in front of people, but I've started to like it.

- I'm looking forward to like moving around mostly because it's PVPA and moving around.

- Doing my solo, that's the fun part.

- I'm looking forward to tomorrow because I know the kids are gonna feel that sense of like, wow, I just did this.

I spent three weeks working on this and I can perform it in front of the people that I know, in front of all my peers.

- And I think that sense of accomplishment is amazing, doing something you've never done before, probably in front of several hundred people, dancing and getting it done and doing it right.

But what I do see is a transferable life skill.

Something like getting along with new people, going into a situation and trying or doing something you've never done before.

- Really awesome job today, you are gonna have a wonderful snowy weekend.

You get to rest, take care of yourselves, review your choreography.

Really beautiful job everybody.

Thank you so much.

(soft music) (students chatting) (light music) Okay.

Go ahead.

So welcome students, families, Leeds faculty and staff to our culminating performances of the Dance Education Laboratory, DEL, PVPA partnership.

(applause) (gentle tribal music) (soft upbeat music) (upbeat music) (audience cheering) (applause) (upbeat tribal music) (applause) - I didn't like dance before, but now I like our group teachers and they are Tali and Emily.

- Our moves are really cool.

First we line up in two rows of four.

Then we start moving our arms in a creepy way.

Then we sneak around after that, we scatter.

Then we spin.

Then we're done.

- I feel a little bit more confident than I did before.

And I learned a lot of social skills from talking to kids.

(soft music) - I am seeing things from a new perspective.

It's good when your students support you as a teacher and that really helps a lot with how you see yourself and your image in the mirror.

- Well, so when I was younger in elementary school, I was really bullied for like a really long time.

And so I kind of didn't have a lot of confidence in myself and then I started dancing more often and then I did this.

So I've enjoyed being a part of DEL so much because it's helped me be more confident.

And I just feel like I can work with the kids and relate to them.

And I've made so many relationships with the kids.

- Talking about it makes me wanna cry.

Like it's my last year and like working with them and it was really great working with you guys.

And I'm super glad I got to work with you.

- I'm not exactly sure what I wanna do, but I know I really wanna explore throughout my first year or two of college and take as many classes as I can and the subjects I'm interested in, but not giving up dance and education.

- My future is pretty uncertain right now.

I mean I know I wanna go to college.

I know I wanna keep dancing.

I know I wanna keep teaching.

- I think this has inspired me definitely to go and do more dance in life.

And I think that's one of the things I have to start doing.

- I wish there was dance in school.

- I wanna dance in school every day.

- We are always making dances about something.

And right now I feel very strongly that it's important to make dances that actually can change the world.

This collaborative community-based positive affirming model is what we need in this kind of time.

And I'm thinking about the next generation.

And I'm like, we gotta be focusing on what is nurturing and positive and affirming and will lift up someone and increase someone's self-esteem and give them a voice so they're empowered to say something.

And we say it collectively in our little community groups and we say it individually and we say it so we're heard and seen in the world.

(applause) (upbeat music) (gentle music) (upbeat music) (soft music) (upbeat music)