Department of Dance

Advisement & Assessment

Faculty advisement goes beyond advice for scheduling classes. A dance adviser helps you see the larger picture of all the possibilities available for you within the field of dance. Personal strengths and passions are measured with skills and career options needed to realize your goals after college.  Each year connections with alumni, professionals, and guest artists help you and your adviser determine your direction.

You are assigned a First Year Adviser, currently the dance chairperson, who works closely with you for your first year.  If you move from a pre-major status to a major status, you will be placed with a dance faculty for your remaining tenure as a BFA candidate.

Degree Progress and Artistic Assessment

Towson University has an online system of tracking and communicating degree progress for each student. This Degree Progress Assessment is used with each adviser/advisee communication with the Registrar. The software carefully tracks each student's progress through the dance major. It also allows students to track their own progress with accuracy.

There are a series of milestones that each dance major will reach and achieve during the journey to graduation.

• Acceptance into Towson University

• Successful audition into the pre-dance major status

• Successful completion of Dance Foundational Coursework with an earned grade of B or 3.0 average

• Completion of Sophomore Juries

• For the K-12 certification, successful completion of the Praxis, Internship and Portfolio

The dance faculty have high expectations that you will put forth your best effort to grow. However, assessment is not based on effort, but on the clearly articulated criteria offered within each class syllabus. Each syllabus establishes a contract between the student and the faculty as to the goals, expectations, content and assessment of that particular course.

Students are also assessed for artistic growth using the following criteria.

Key Learning Goals for all Dance Majors

The student will:

1. The students will synthesis expressive range, stylistic versatility, and high standard of rigor within healthy technical achievement and somatic understanding.

• Maps with the required TU assessment categories of effective communication, critical analysis and reasoning, specialized knowledge in defined fields, flexible thought.
• Maps with the optional TU assessment category of awareness of difference and commonality necessary for local and global citizenship and leadership.

2. The students will analyze, intuit, produce, deliver and evaluate the creative process for original dance choreography.

• Maps with the required TU assessment categories of effective communication, critical analysis and reasoning, specialized knowledge in defined fields, flexible thought.
• Maps with the optional TU assessment category of awareness of difference and commonality necessary for local and global citizenship and leadership.
• Maps with the required Middle States assessment categories of information literacy and technological competency.

3. The students will demonstrate oral and written skills, information literacy, critical thinking in aesthetic language, and historical/worldview perspectives.

• Maps with the required TU assessment categories of effective communication, critical analysis and reasoning, specialized knowledge in defined fields, flexible thought.
• Maps with the optional TU assessment category of awareness of difference and commonality necessary for local and global citizenship and leadership.
• Maps with the required Middle States assessment categories of information literacy and technological competency.

4. The students will define, invent, teach and evaluate the craft of age and latent appropriate pedagogy skills.

• Maps with the required TU assessment category of flexible thought.
• Maps with the optional TU assessment category of awareness of difference and commonality necessary for local and global citizenship and leadership.

5. The students will recognize, choose and demonstrate leadership skills.

• Maps with the required TU assessment categories of effective communication and specialized knowledge in defined fields.
• Maps with the optional TU assessment category of awareness of difference and commonality necessary for local and global citizenship and leadership.
  

Assessment of the Dancer's Internal Process

Artistic assessment considers the dancer's internal processes.

Dancers must be willing to:

• change and grow

• distinguish choices

• alternate between where you have been and your new choice

• change via the instructor's cueing

• self cue

• maintain new choices while in motion

If a student can self cue and maintain that choice while moving through space and time, the student has earned a mastery of the material and an A has been earned.

Department of Dance
Center for the Arts, Room 1002
Hours: Monday - Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Phone: 410-704-2760
Fax: 410-704-3752
E-mail: spink@towson.edu