A colleague at PDS sent me this link. Can scientists dance? It seems they can. And why should we be surprised?
In his well-known TEDTalk on Creativity Sir Ken Robinson made some fun about academics gyrating off the beat at the social end of scholarly conferences. It appears it doesn’t have to be that way. Robinson also observed that some people need to move to think.
Read about the world’s first Dance your Ph.D contest (next year they are going global). And don’t neglect to check out the videos.
The rules were simple: Using no words or images, interpret your Ph.D. thesis in dance form. Entrants were divided into three categories—graduate student, postdoc, and professor—and the prize for each was a year’s subscription to Science.
Perhaps a better (generalized) question is: Do dancers understand Newton’s second law of thermodynamics? And if not, why is that? And could interpretative dance (used here as a stand-in for the arts) help?
The item about dancing your Ph.D. on your blog reminded me very seriously of this study:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/hand-gestures-dramatically-improve-learning-13790.html
The gestures improved learning in algebra. So, dance, would, I think fit into the same category as a gesture. I have students model things with their whole bodies, but I am going to think about a bigger “choreography” project that they can create after reading about the dance.