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- Advocate in your school and your community. Celebrate the achievements of your students and the impact dance has on their education.
- Consider starting a chapter of the National Honor Society for Dance Arts at your school or studio (click here for more information). By recognizing the artistic and academic achievements of exceptional dance students, you help to honor the field of dance education overall and improve our image to those outside the field.
- Help your students become docents of their learning. Empower them to understand and articulate the importance of dance in their education to their parents, friends, classmates, teachers, and school leaders.
- Incorporate advocacy efforts in your curriculum. Have students write letters to government officials or the editors of local newspapers in support of dance and dance education. For sample assignments, click here.
- Be informed and spread the word. Collect evidence on the value of dance education to support your programs and classes.
- Check out our Advocacy Tools page for videos, publications, brochures, and statistics that support the role of dance in education.
- Collect your own evidence by asking students to write testimonials about the impact of dance education in their lives and documenting the good work that they do through videos, blogs, websites, digital archives and portfolios.
- Share your evidence with NDEO and with your local community. Post to our online forums, share on social media, and publicize your students’ efforts by inviting the media to cover important events and issues.
- Use this information to support, market, and improve your program.
- Stay up to date. Follow the latest developments in advocacy news via our Online Advocacy Forum. Here, you can learn about national issues as well as prompt discussions and share insights from your local experience.
- Let NDEO help! Keep us informed of your advocacy needs so that we can better serve you as the largest dance education membership organization in the country.
- If you have an advocacy concern that needs immediate attention, contact NDEO’s Advisory Board member for Advocacy, Stephanie Milling, at smilling@mailbox.sc.edu.
- NDEO staff is available for consultations and can arrange for speaking engagements with NDEO Executive Director to address your local and state needs. For example, the Colorado Dance Education Organization (CoDEO) needed expert testimony in support of state dance certification, and contacted NDEO Executive Director, Susan McGreevy-Nichols to speak on their behalf. For this type of assistance and other general advocacy inquires contact Betsy Loikow at bloikow@ndeo.org.
- Get involved in advocacy at the local and state levels. Join a local arts organization or partner with other nearby schools and studios to create your own! At the state level, your NDEO state affiliate can provide opportunities for networking and advocacy. More info on state affiliates can be found here.
- Get involved in advocacy at the national level. Participate annually in the National Arts Advocacy Day held in Washington, DC in early spring.
- Join NDEO to urge Congress to provide more funding for dance and adopt stronger policies that support the arts. For more information on Arts Advocacy day click here.
- Speak up for dance education! Write to your elected officials to let them know you are a dance educator, and you vote!
- Americans for the Arts has created a simple platform from which you can easily contact your local, state, and national officials to show your support for dance and dance education funding and policies find out more at the Americans for the Arts Advocacy Center. For tips on drafting and formatting your letter visit the Advocacy Forum.
- Support your school, studio, or program by using Best Practices in your teaching. Learn about the new National Core Arts Standards and use them to advocate for effective, safe and developmentally appropriate dance education in your school or studio.
- NDEO is launching a two year-long professional development effort for education in and implementation of the new Core Arts Standards for Dance. Join us for webinars, OPDI courses and regional special topics conferences focused on the standards. Keep checking our website for details; for more information regarding the standards click here.
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