Dance and mathematics: Engaging senses in learning.

This article illustrates how kinaesthetic experiences associated with dance might be used in teaching to promote engagement and learning in spatial, rhythmic, structural and symbolic aspects of mathematics. Educational institutions searching for quick fix solutions to underachievement may be tempted to adopt one of the many theories offered that advise teaching different students in different ways according to their preferred learning styles. For example, in some schools students are tested to find out if they are visual, aural or kinaesthetic learners and then teachers are advised to teach them accordingly. Kinaesthetic and musical sensitivities join together in the rhythms of dance. Many people need to respond physically to certain rhythms, either feeling them resonate within or by toe-tapping or getting up and dancing. At a very elementary level, there are links that can be made between rote learning and rhythm, such as choreographing the times tables. Rather less obviously teachers can exploit classical rhythms to develop a sense of fractions, as musical notation does in time signatures and note values. Abstract representations of structure, such as permutations, combinations, graph theory and groups, are manifested in many traditional dances.