Study on Status Quo of Dance Education among University Students and Countermeasures

Since the 90s in the Twentieth Century, China has always been advocating artistic education for all-round development among university students. As part of education for all-round development, dance education has entered classes in universities and has enabled quite a lot of people who care about dance education to feel delighted. In the mean while, how to make dance education really play its role in education for all-round development also has become a problem which is considered and reflected by all people involved in dance education in general institutions of higher learning. This article makes an analysis in the status quo and reasons of dance education among university students and puts forward countermeasures and suggestions for reform of dance education among university students.

Dance education among university students is one of the important contents in artistic education.An analysis of existing issues and reasons of dance education among university students in China and an exploration of countermeasures and measures of reform of dance education among university students has significant realistic meaning to improve the comprehensive quality of university students and enhance the education teaching quality among university students.

Analysis of the status quo of dance education among university students
Compared with other artistic education, dance education in higher colleges and universities in China started later.It has been discovered in the wide survey on dance education in some colleges and universities, standards and methods in all universities to carry out dance education are varied, and some universities list dance education into the Department of Social Science as human quality education.Some universities set up unique artistic centers, set up dance troupes for university students and attribute dance troupe into the scope of Youth League Committee in the universities.By contrast, some other universities list dance as the Department of Physics habitually and set up selected courses of dance.The major reasons which cause these phenomena are that the economic conditions, dance classrooms and dance teachership are not qualified and perfect in these universities.However, within the short period of several years, with emphasis by people on artistic education in colleges and universities, dance education has been continuously development and has become an important content in quality education in universities today.Although methods and standards to carry out dance education in universities are varied from each other, they all attach great importance to the entertainment functions and educational functions of dance education and give full play to the important role of dance education in cultivating university students' healthy aesthetic concepts and aesthetic capacity, edifying their lofty moral sentiment and moulding their benign physical beauty.
Since the 90s in the Twentieth Century, China has always been advocating artistic education for all-round development among university students.As part of education for all-round development, dance education has entered classes in universities and has enabled quite a lot of people who care about dance education to feel delighted.In the mean while, how to make dance education really play its role in education for all-round development also has become a problem which is considered and reflected by all people involved in dance education in general institutions of higher learning.As part of art education, one of the purposes of dance education is to cultivate more excellent compound talents for development of scientific development, but not merely fostering students' dance skills and performance capacity.Otherwise, it is difficult for dance education to be connected with cultivation of science-oriented talents in art education.From this perspective, we can discover mainly the following four problems of dance education in education for all-round development in colleges and universities in China.
1.1 Dance education more carries out practical education in general institutions of higher learning and its scope of popularization is not extensive.
The teaching content of dance education in general institutions of higher learning at present, on one hand, is learning of dance works, and on the other hand, is to rehearse performance of rich campus cultural activities.Restrained by ages and physical conditions, quite a large number of university students lose confidence in learning of dance courses, and they are afraid of learning dance, which is especially serious among university students of agricultural department.Thus, it is particularly difficult to conduct further teaching in learning of dance works.However, in campus cultural activities, what dance aims at is to enable university students to appreciate who do not have strong sense of participation.If university students' capacity of participation in dance is not enough, then it is difficult for them to achieve a common sense.Therefore, those who are involved in dance education is not as many as those involved in other artistic disciplines and the degree of emphasis on dance education in artistic education in colleges and universities is not enough compared with other artistic courses.

Setting of content of dance courses is not combined with cultivation of quality of creative talents.
At present, artistic education in colleges and universities mostly aims at improvement of skills and appreciation level of students, and is centered with cultivation of students' artistic thinking ability, artistic sentiment and recognition of "beauty".Dance education merely focuses on improvement of students' skills and development of their artistic thinking capacity, but does not combine improvement of students' artistic knowledge and cultivation of creative talents.Most colleges and universities put emphasis on scientific thinking capacity in their cultivation of talents, and figurativeness of artistic thinking can improve, affect and promote scientific and logic thinking.Although scientific thinking is strict and abstract and has essential difference from the emotionality and visualization of artistic thinking, as a matter of fact, the thinking mode of human being is complicated and non-linear, and has the characteristics of plyability.Artistic thinking has the characteristics of emotional image.Thus, when artistic thinking is combined with scientific thinking, the organic combination and mutual interaction of the two can more expand the thinking space of human being, enlighten and make up for logistic thinking and helps scientific thinking to gain success.Thus, in colleges and universities, especially those with the main stream of agricultural science, if the artistic education neglects combination with scientific and technical research activities, then it might be out of line with education for all-round development in a real sense.

Dance education is out of line with other human and social science education
On the basis of cultivating artistic skills of university students, dance education should concentrate more on cultivating students' artistic appreciation ability, artistic evaluation ability and particular artistic insight in objects, and should also transfer dance and other human and social science subjects into comprehensive ability of feeling.That is to say, focus of dance education should transfer from ontology of dance to combination of other subjects, such as aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and architecture.Professor Liu Qingge once said, "The interdisciplinary theory of dance mainly includes theory of interdiscipline subjects (dance aesthetics, psychology, anthropology, sociology and pedagogy) in which dance and human and social science subjects are interrelated, and study on interdiscipline subjects in which dance and natural sciences are interrelated."For example, in practical classes, popularization of dance knowledge should be emphasized.In appreciation classes, after we give lectures about authors, creative motive, manifestation content and structural appreciation, we should further extend content of the classes and enlighten students to expound their feelings from the perspective of art theory, art sociology, art psychology and art philosophy, so as to enrich and improve content of art education for all-round development.

Dance education has not established a clear-cut position in the system of artistic education.
At present, artistic courses set up in colleges and universities in China are mostly selective courses, mainly including free selective course and limited selective course.Courses that can be set up can be divided into three categories.one category is courses centered with skills and technique, such as singing skill, learning of all sorts of instruments and selective learning of dance works, etc. Number of such sort of selective courses and their scale are varied due to limitation of occasion, funds and teacher resources, etc.The second sort of courses is set up to resolve the problem that students have to possess basic knowledge to learn a selective artistic course, such as basic music theory and dance basic training, etc.This sort of selective courses is set up in almost all colleges and universities.The third sort is courses of appreciation.Different schools set up such a sort of selective courses with different contents.Some schools set up classic music appreciation courses, some set up folk music appreciation courses, some set up western music appreciation courses, some set up typical music appreciation courses, some set up opera dance drama or a list of plays or operas appreciation courses, and some set up purely special music appreciation courses and dance works appreciation courses (not many in some schools).These three sorts of courses occupy different proportions in selective artistic courses in colleges and universities, and have no unified and complete teaching outline and assessment standard.

Analysis of causes
There are various reasons for problems existing in dance education in general institutions of higher learning.Subjectively speaking, it is as a result of deficient recognition and deficient emphasis on dance education for all-round development in the ideological thinking.Restrained by traditional concepts, the scale of dance education is still open to be expanded.In the ideological thinking, education on cultural knowledge outside arts is more concentrated, while the role of dance education in the education of quality of human being is ignored.
In terms of knowledge in the brain science, people underestimated the role of development of dance arts in the right brain in the past.According to scientists, the left brain is of intelligence and the right brain is abundant in emotion; the right brain can participate with the left brain to make a decision and harmony of speeches and action of people is dependent on the interaction between the left and right brain.From ancient times to present, training of people in the left brain is mainly dependent on speeches and words in the civilized society for education, which has led to the result that training on the left brain takes up the superior position while the right brain is underdeveloped.As a result, the serious loss of balance is not favorable for a comprehensive improvement of the individual quality.Thus, there has, for a long time, been existing the situation that the right brain is underdeveloped and cultivation of emotional thinking and image thinking is relatively weak.
Education of emotional quotient among university students is not enough.The ultimate purpose of education among university students is to let human beings more adaptive to the society.Intelligent quotient is especially important to development of human kind, whereas the emotional quotient of human being can enable the intelligent quotient of people to be fully explored in social development.In connection between artistic education and the society, both observation by predecessors and the practical artistic practice of later generations tell us that connection between artistic education and the society is one of bidirectional relationship and those who accept education are enlightened by artistic works to realize arts.The reproduction of content, forms and types of artistic works, formation of the style, development of artistic history and diversification of recognition concept are all restrained by certain times background, certain social conditions and certain living conditions.Formation of an artistic works is the outcome of the society, reflection of social life, and this kind of reflection is indirect and flexural and is formed through the intermediate aspect of people's emotion.In the process of realizing artistic works, people's emotion is enlightened by artistic works and produces the recognition concept.At the same time, people's emotion reacts up on people's social action and social relation.
From an objective perspective, the teacher resources for dance and art education in colleges and universities are deficient and the proportion of teachers in those who are involved in art education for all-round development is still small, and some schools even do not have dance teachers for art education.Furthermore, teachers who are involved in dance teaching are seldom trained for professional dance.Besides, the knowledge structure of teachers who are purely trained for professional dance learning is single, which, together with non-plyability of teachers, becomes the obstacle for us to promote dance education.Cultivation of students is directly influenced because dance teachers are affected by traditional art education, their own quality is deficient, together with the traditional feature of teaching method and specialization of dance profession and imperfect teaching system and insufficient emphasis on teachers in the schools.In the mean while, teachers who are involved in dance and art education in colleges and universities occupy only a small proportion and have not formed a large group, so academic communication is generally insufficient.

Several suggestions for reform of dance education among university students
At the time when art education in colleges and universities lead university students to go towards the art palace, colleges and university should focus more on cultivation of the capacity of students.Only if they cultivate students' imagination, creativeness and artistic thinking capacity, can they develop scientific intelligence in the process of education for all-round development and serve for scientific education.Considering the current art education in colleges and universities at present, the author believes that dance education should conduct reform from the following several aspects.It is obviously not realistic for the course system of "one major, several supplements" to list dance and art courses into the major courses of colleges and universities.As a matter of fact, the more the categories of dance and art courses opened and the more the branches of these courses, the more difficult it is for university students to make a choice.Thus, the multiple dance selective courses should be integrated into one in a scientific way, should be lengthened in class hours and reduced in the number of categories.No matter what kind of subjects is set up, first of all, colleges and universities should start from the perspective of education for all-round development.Mostly importantly, they should set up a course that has the asymptotic property and plyability in the content system.That is, they should appreciate and analyze artistic works according to the physical conditions and learning ability of university students and on the basis of giving lectures about basic dance and art theory and evaluate and appreciate artistic works from the perspective of other artistic and social sciences.Dance and art courses should be based on this course, and other courses should be regarded as supplementary.If it is allowed, this course can be set up as a kind of dance and art required course for university students.In such way, they can avoid the situation that students have no way to make a choice, and meanwhile, can expand space for students to choose dance courses of other categories.In the same time, we should carry out the purpose of art education for all-round development and set up some selective courses of such interdiscipline subjects as dance aesthetics, dance psychology, dance sociology and art philosophy for setting up of supplementary dance and art courses, so as to satisfy different demands of university students.
Colleges and universities should pay attention to practical education forms and should hold some campus cultural activities in addition to giving lectures in class in the process of dance and art education for all-round development, such as dance communication association, salon and panel discussion, etc.In the process of holding this sort of activities, colleges and universities should organize activities for students with different artistic levels in addition to certain width and depth.They may regard artistic core members as a "point" to activate common students and stimulate university students' interest and favor in dance and art, and they can establish dance troupe and art studio, etc, spontaneously.They can also expand communication and cooperation among university students, learn to meet practical needs in the process of creation and practice and make theory deepened in practice and achieve the purpose of cultivating talents through art education.
Colleges and universities should perfect the professional knowledge structure of teachers.At present, the knowledge structure of teachers involved in dance and art education in colleges and universities is faced up with two problems.Firstly is learning of professional dance knowledge and secondly is learning of knowledge in psychology, philosophy, sociology and aesthetics.Only colleges and universities cultivate teachers with compound knowledge structure, can they cultivate comprehensive talents.Thus, multi-discipline training on teachers of dance and art in colleges and universities is an important aspect for dance and art education for all-round development.
In one word, dance education in colleges and universities at present needs to re-establish a new cultivation target, that is, to transfer from skill-oriented education to comprehensive development education of artistic quality and scientific quality.The so-called comprehensive development of artistic quality and scientific quality firstly refers to development of artistic quality.Namely, dance education focuses on the improvement of students' quality, but not simply "learning" and "appreciation".Comprehensive development of artistic quality also needs to combine dance and art education and scientific education in an organic way, realize mutual promotion and benign interaction between the two and play an interdiscipline and supplementary role for cultivating compound and high quality talents.Cultivation target is the direction and standard for growth of talents and is the premise and guidance for all teaching activities.Change of direction of colleges and universities in cultivation target of dance education will affect such dance teaching practices as course setting, teaching design and activity organization, etc, will put forward more demands on the teacher resources of dance and art education, will push art quality of university students to a higher level and will fianlly improve the comprehensive quality of university students in an overall way.