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“Pas a dos” is the name of a joint project by Barkeno School and Mercat de les Flors-Graner.

We take the name from the expression “pas à deux”, i.e. a dance duet: Barkeno School and Mercat de les Flors-Graner formed an educational duet within the Schools in Tandem project (2014-2017).

‘Schools in Tandem’ is a collaboration project between Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera and the Education Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Mercat de les Flors and Graner form a tandem with Barkeno School, in La Marina Neighbourhood. Schools in Tandem is an innovative educational project in which schools partner with important organisations in order to foster educational success.

The project is based on the fact that the curricula of some centres are specialized on a particular subject (music, science, audiovisual arts…). During three years, the project aims to create a comprehensive and sensitive space in which the language of dance and the arts of movement can be a vehicle and a subject, discovery and experience.

www.escolestandem.cat

During the first year of the Tandem Project various actions were undertaken. They can be summarized in the following lines of work:

1. Training: An exclusive and practical training in dance for the teaching staff.
2. Dance in the classroom: Dance and movement were incorporated to the learning schedule.
3. Dance actions: dance actions and activities conducted by the teaching staff during the school celebrations.

The development of these lines of work allowed to:

• Understand and discover dance at school—to impregnate the school with the essence of dance
• Incorporate dance and work to the school timetable
• Experiment, revise, share and redefine methodologies and practices at school and in the classroom
• Use dance as a tool and a method to learn
• See dance as a transversal language in relation to the other subjects
• Share work methodologies with teachers, colleagues, other choreographers and dance educationalists
• Put into practice the learnings received during the training period into the everyday life of the school and the classroom.
• Slowly incorporate dance into the school’s celebrations and events

After the first year, it was decided to focus action on two main points

• A more personalized assistance to teachers, so that they could find the most adequate methodology for their groups.
• The assistance of choreographers at the classroom from the beginning of the year, so that it became part of the everyday life of the school

GOALS

Around the school’s curricular work

• To discuss about and share methodologies with teachers from other schools that incorporate dance in their curricula.
• To share projects with other schools related to ‘Maestros en Danza’, a resident work group at Mercat de les Flor’s (Escola del Mar and Escola Martí i Pol).
• To observe and analyse teaching units from different levels in which to introduce dance based work.
• To debate and find out how to look for and design the most adequate resources
• To share the conclusions of the counselling provided by the choreographers.
• To use dance as a tool and methodology to learn, as a transversal language in relation to the other subjects.
• To look for an educational methodology that helps understand educational transversality.
• To understand and find out how dance based work can have a positive influence on educational skills.
• To foster dialogue between choreographers and teachers in order to find out which subjects are more easily linkable to dance based work.

After the second year, we evaluated the need to focus on the following two points:

• To reflect on the elaboration of an educational method that could ease and promote changes at Barkeno School
• To design a project that contemplated dance as another learning process and see how it could coexist and become consolidated in the school. To work on the emotions through dance and movement based work

GOALS

Around the school’s curricular work

• To use dance as a tool and methodology to learn, as a transversal language in relation to the other subjects
• To understand and find out how dance based work can have a positive influence on educational skills.
• Share work methodologies with teachers, colleagues, other choreographers and dance educationalists.
• To design artistic projects in the classroom alongside the organisers of the tandem project, the board of choreographers and the group tutors.
• To promote a dialogue between chorepgraphers and teachers to generate a discourse about the language of contemporary dance.
• To give teachers tools to attend cognitive diversity and strategies for project based learning.