These practices need not be confined to the dance studio. I have provided examples from Holt, O’Brien, and Lampert that demonstrate how improvisational practices can be successfully integrated with multiple subjects and at any level. In doing so, however, a teacher’s work shifts from imparting knowledge to co-constructing knowledge with students– work that requires a different set of skills (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Curriculum is not
abandoned in these examples, but is used as a resource; familiarity with the big ideas and fundamental questions in a domain can help teachers organize and frame students’ suggestions or naïve theories and facilitate productive discourse around them€– discourse that ultimately teaches students how to engage in the collective advancement of knowledge (Zhang et al., 2009).