Urbana teacher brings love of dance, arts to classroom

Last weekend’s Boneyard Arts Festival was all about promoting the arts in Champaign County, showcasing the talent in Champaign and Urbana. At the Urbana Free Library, visual and performing arts from students in the Urbana School District were on display.

In the children’s section, students’ self-portraits and mixed media art projects showed what the children had been learning in class. Meanwhile, troupes of dancers from Urbana elementary schools performed everything from tap dance to some of their own choreography in the nearby auditorium.

Behind the scenes making it all happen was Urbana’s elementary fine arts coordinator, Betty Allen.

In Urbana, students in kindergarten through fifth grade experience dance, drama, music and visual art on a six week rotation. When it’s time for dance and drama, students at Flossie Wiley and Yankee Ridge Elementary schools see Mrs. Allen.

Teaching dance and drama to elementary students wasn’t what Allen envisioned as her future career as a student at the Illinois State University, though.

“I guess I always thought I would be at a high school because there’s not a lot of elementary programs out there,” Allen said. “So I guess doing my student teaching in dance at the high school level, I just thought ‘I’ll be at a high school.’ And then this position came open and I took it.

“I did student teach at the elementary level, but I just never thought I’d be at the elementary level,” Allen added. “But after being at this level, I love it and now I can’t see myself doing anything else.”

Teaching elementary students wasn’t the only adjustment Allen had to make when she took the position, however. The way the curriculum in the district is structured, she also serves as the drama teacher.

“I always have been around, you know, plays and musicals and things, but I really had to kind of dive into that curriculum more than the dance. The dance curriculum is, you know, I’ve got that, but I had to do a little more in the drama area just to make sure that I was right on track,” Allen said. “But now, you know, I’ve been doing it long enough that it just seems natural and normal. I never thought I’d be dance and drama, kindergarten through fifth, but that’s what’s happened and it’s been good.”

Allen’s students agree that Mrs. Allen makes dance and drama something they look forward to every day.

“She’s like really good at dancing,” Zina Dolan, a fourth-grade student at Flossie Wiley said. “She has like lots of good opinions and she’ll help you do stuff."

Demonstrating the motions in front of a class of active second-grade students, Allen’s enthusiasm for dance is evident.

“Mason, see if you can go smaller, see? You don’t have to go way far out. Ah, keep it in, see?”

“Right, left, right, left, right, left, left, left, left,” Allen counts off for the students, helping them remember the next motion in their newest dance, “The Mexican Hat Dance.”

As soon as one dance is over, Allen moves quickly to the next, not giving the now energized class a chance to get too distracted in between. Wooden sticks in blues, greens, yellows and reds are quickly in eager hands and held crossed over heads, ready to dance to “Los Machetes.”

“Under over, under over, back, front, uno, dos, tres,” Allen keeps time to the music. Wooden sticks bang together as eager students follow their teacher.
“How many times do we do that pattern Miles?”
“Eight times.” Miles, a dark-haired second-grader responds.
“You’re close, four times. Now the music is much faster, ready?” the trendy teacher clad in black and white asks as she restarts the music and dances along with the class.

The dances from Mexico that the second-grade students are learning now is at the request of their teacher, who will be teaching a section on Mexico after her students’ rotation through dance class is over.

“She’s just a wonderful teaching colleague and I’m just so happy to get a chance to work with her,” Flossie Wiley second grade teacher Patty Bergan said. “She took what one of our classroom projects was, because I’m not shy about, although we have arts teachers, I’m not shy about having dance and drama and art and music things going on in my classroom at other times of the day and times of the year.”

A veteran teacher herself, Bergan appreciates Allen’s approach to teaching the arts.

“I think (the students) feel this is a safe environment. Mrs. Allen makes it a safe environment for all things expressive,” Bergan said. “And that includes sometimes some boys who might, even at a young age, start getting a little bit of macho about them, but I don’t see any (of that).”

Even second graders can appreciate Allen’s hands-on teaching approach.

“Whenever she’s teaching dance and if we do something like a little mistake, she jut tells us to try it again,” Caitlyn Tinerella said.

Part of Allen’s passion for dance may be associated with her lifelong participation in the arts.

“Initially, I guess it was my parents, you know, putting me in dance classes. But I don’t know, it’s just something with their initial probing, I guess, or pushing, something I’ve always done and it’s just like a part of me now,” Allen said. “I can’t imagine not dancing or having dance. It’s still fun and I love it and I love to move.”

Born in Ohio, Allen began dancing before she reached kindergarten. She continued dancing when her family relocated to southern Illinois when she was in eighth grade.

It was dance that brought the petite blonde and her husband, David, together when they were both sophomores in high school.

“She was in the marching band color guard and I was in the marching band and she was always involved in anything that had dance tied to it. Color guard, in our small town, was one of the only ways to explore that, you know,” David Allen said. “So, we were kind of the same group of friends. It was like our sophomore year in high school actually. Dated all through high school and college and got married at the end of our undergrad.”

The self-proclaimed band geeks weren’t done with the activity that brought them together after high school, however.

“I taught high school band and you know marching band, you’ve got the color guard. We were kind of a team for that,” David Allen said.

Their band days may be behind them, but David Allen is also a member of the arts community in Champaign County as the coordinator of outreach and public engagement for the University’s School of Music. While they focus on students of very different ages, their purpose is essentially the same.

“I think we’re both kind of interested in figuring out situations that give the kids a chance to have experiences they wouldn’t otherwise. We don’t get up and perform on the stage, neither of us really,” David Allen said. “We have that background, but I tell people I like to point the spotlight more than be in it.

“You can influence a lot of people that way if you put the right teacher in front of the right kid or the right performer in front of the right kid, they can be inspired for life,” he added. “That’s basically what I do and I think that’s pretty much what (Betty does). We’re coordinators of experiences.”

As the elementary fine arts coordinator for the district, Betty Allen has orchestrated multiple experiences for her students.

Working with the School of Music and a CU Foundation Grant, Allen arranged to have students at all the elementary schools experience a performance of gamelan and Balinese dance.

According to Wikipedia, a gamelan is an Indonesian musical ensemble composed of a set of instruments that is designed and tuned to be played together, meaning the instruments of different gamelans can’t be interchanged. They may include instruments from bamboo flutes to bowed and plucked strings, to drums and gongs.

I Ketut Gede Asnawa, a visiting professor of musicology and gamelan in the University’s School of Music, has brought the gamelan as several pieces and performed the gamelan for Urbana students.

“It’s really, really cool. And then he also has had his daughter and his wife in to do Balinese dance,” Allen said. “So at each of the schools we’ve had an assembly for the whole student body to get to see the gamelan and listen to it and see dancing and then we’ve chose one grade at each school to do workshops in both of those areas.”

Allen’s students don’t only watch impressive performances, however. They also have opportunities to be the performers. Outside of classroom instruction, Allen also teaches a volunteer performing group of fourth and fifth-grade students from Yankee Ridge.

For an hour after school on Tuesdays, the students work on choreography, mostly arranged by Allen, to perform at the end of the semester. In the fall, participants perform in the Foellinger Great Hall in the Krannert Center, where the Chicago Symphony, Luciano Pavarotti and other renowned professionals have also taken the stage.

“It’s amazing how they rise to the occasion because they, you know, they’ve never been on a stage like that or in a venue like that and it just looks like they’ve done this over and over again every year,” Allen said.

It may be some time before the students fully appreciate what they have accomplished by performing in the Great Hall, but Allen’s hard work and dedication isn’t lost on her students’ parents.

“(She) leaves some space in there for them to do their own creative thing, but also she teaches them some really good basics, I think, for dance,” said Maggie Whicker, whose daughter is a fourth grader in the volunteer performing group. “This is Sarah’s only dance experience, and she’s really blossomed with Betty being her teacher, so we’ve decided dance is kind of cool.”

Making dance an enjoyable experience for students from a kindergarten through fifth grade with a wide variety of learning styles is no easy task. But it’s one Allen has managed to achieve.

“It’s just obvious how much she enjoys it, but also how she tries to, I think, engage in the child’s world to get them involved, help them discover what it is that she’s asking them to do because it’s often a new experience for children to do the dancing, the rhythm, the role playing,” Flossie Wiley Principal Barbara Sartain said. “Those things take a little bit of risk on the part of children and she makes it delightful and she breaks it down properly, her teaching skills are so good, so that it’s accessible to kids of all different levels of talent and all different ages.”

For Allen, it’s the little moments that make teaching worthwhile.

“Lilly, when she was in second grade, we rotate every six weeks, so I had been here like the first six weeks of the semester, and at the end of the school year, she wrote me this letter that was just unbelievable,” Allen said. “It was just so nice and so sweet. It was just one of those things that it’s in my keep folder, you know, that I’ll have forever.”

Lilly is a fourth-grader at Flossie Wiley Elementary and one of Mrs. Allen’s biggest fans.

“I’ve always thought that she was really nice, like she’s always been really nice to us,” Lilly said. “She’s never been unfair.”

Even if her current students don’t go on to be professionals in dance or the arts, Allen feels there are plenty of applications they can take away from dance and drama to apply in their lives.

“I’m hoping that their eyes are a little bit more opened, just in general, that they can understand a little bit more about the arts, they can appreciate the arts and just that they maybe have a little bit more, you know, creative problem solving that they take with them,” Allen said. “And I want them to be able to enjoy it, you know, be a lifelong thing.”