Walking the Talk: Connecting Movement and Literacy with Poetry and Visual Art

Fall 2019

Alan Brown, Christina Soriano.

This article describes a beginning-level university dance class with a literacy education focus in which sixteen male student-athletes engaged in readings and movement activities connecting poetry, dance, visual imagery, multimodal literacies, and brain-based learning. These university students took what they learned about the ways that movement shapes and illuminates their personal identities, creative processes, and academic experiences and shared those lessons with 125 fourth graders at a local elementary school on four occasions during the fall semester. The purpose of this article is to showcase what various art forms, like poetry and visual art, can teach us about ourselves, how we move in the world, how we perform our identities, and how these forms can inspire the content of our own personal and group movements.