At Parents as Teachers Annual Conference at Denver
A couple of years ago, as part of the ReadyNation Brain Science Speakers Bureau, I was invited to talk at the Parents as Teachers National Center annual conference.
Using Bharatanatyam and neuroscience, I talked about how the act of taking care of a child, a pet, or a plant is a profound act that fundamentally changes us on a neuronal and societal level. Over the next several weeks, I will present work from that meeting and articulate how caregiving is powerful in its impacts on us as a society!
Using Bharatanatyam and neuroscience, I talked about how the act of taking care of a child, a pet, or a plant is a profound act that fundamentally changes us on a neuronal and societal level. Over the next several weeks, I will present work from that meeting and articulate how caregiving is powerful in its impacts on us as a society!
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One might wonder why use science and dance to think about the world around us. Isn’t one discipline enough? Maybe. But I would say that science and arts together can give us a much richer understanding. As a scientist, I could count the number of times Pup rolls in the dirt, the time between the rolls, the time spent, standing up and smiling, and the angle at which he rotates. I could chemically analyze the color, shape, and patterns of the flower. But the uninhibited joy Pup is experiencing and the beauty we perceive from the flower are ineffable. This, I believe, is the power of embracing the arts and the sciences as complementary ways of thinking about the world around us. We can think of the arts as a way of generating knowledge distinct from, and complimentary to, the scientific method!
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This presentation also gave me an opportunity to use Bharatanatyam to show the life of baseball around me, in upper Manhattan. If the sun's out, people are playing baseball, and it is such a graceful, athletic, almost dance-like sport. Here is me showing baseball through Bharatanatyam at a similar event, the Artful Mind at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. It also is a great example of Bharatanatyam being a language that can effectively be used to communicate contemporary stories and narratives.