A Study relating to Instruction of Samba in Rhythmic Dance A Practical Report of University Teacher Training Course Classes

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to verify the teaching effectiveness of a draft samba lecture that was held as a practical dance lecture for students of a teacher’s college, by firstly holding a two-lecture samba-course (beginner and a medium advanced phase) for enlisted students and evaluating the before-after change in the student’s awareness and sense of learning accomplishment using a paper questionnaire.
The two lectures were composed to focus, for each lecture, on the following three points: practice samba under the instruction of the lecturer, reflect on the instructions given referencing a lecture idea draft and teaching practice (e.g. students take classroom leadership for a mock lesson etc.). Further, the teaching focus of each samba lecture were developed to be: ①To teach the essence of“ dance freely, feel the rhythm and communicate with dance partners” ② to teach the language to express the characteristics of samba rhythm, and its application as teaching method ③ to show the importance for teaching methods to include teacher-lead and student-lead interactive activity in an uninterrupted and smooth teaching flow.
The result of the questionnaire is summarized as follows:
① Regarding the ability to “freely dance the rhythm of samba” asked if it was thought to be “possible or difficult” it was assessed that, while ca. 50% of the students answered “difficult” and ca. 30% “neither” prior to the lectures, this changed significantly positively to more than 90% answering “I can dance” after the second lecture.
Regarding ② “fun-ness of dancing to samba rhythm”, ③ “understanding of the characteristics of samba rhythm”and ④ “understanding of the construction and build-up of a samba lesson”, it was assessed that a signif-icant positive change was observable in the answers after the second lecture compared to those of the first lecture. After the second lecture, all participants answered “it was fun” and “I understood”.
Further, it was possible to summarize that the lecture organization, instruction contents for samba and sam-ba rhythm teaching methods, targeted for students at a teacher’s college, presented in this study had a significant or trending to significant effect on the targeted student’s samba-rhythm dance learning.