Dancing-Art of movements for hearing impaired children

Abstract

Trying to understand the hard of hearing as a whole, it is studied children carrying the pathology through a new approach into the Communication Disorders field. A dance-art of movement program at DERDIC (Institute of Education and Rehabilitation of Communication Disorder’s People) for a class of eight hard of hearing of about seven years old children was developed. This program was based on Rudolf Laban’s Theory of Movement. The classes were given twice a week during one year and most of them were recorded by video cassette. The results show that the students acquired a self knowledge, a positive self image and became more communicative. This expressive potential and their creativity flourished . They had learned to work either in pairs or groups to achieve creativeness together. Furthermore, the voice and verbalizations were facilitated by the dance work. Besides the importance of including dance] art on movement into the school curriculum of hard of hearing children, another significant achieved result was the possibility of integrating these children with hearing ones through the dance-art of movement classes.