NORTHAMPTON – Bridgewater State University graduate Riley Lathrop will spend the 2022-2023 academic year in Taiwan through the Fulbright Program’s English Teaching Assistant Initiative.

Lathrop, a Northampton native who recently earned a spot in this prestigious U.S. State Department international exchange program, spent her time as an undergraduate student at Bridgewater State researching how dance and movement can help non-native English speakers learn the language. She hopes to that research into action while in Taiwan.

Lathrop told Reminder Publishing that she started dancing at the age of 12 at the Holmes Studio of Dance, Music and Wellness where she took classes in acrobat, jazz, musical theater, lyrical and contemporary. She also grew up doing gymnastics, and during her junior year of high school, she began teaching dance at the Holmes Studio. She then decided to major in dance at Bridgewater State.

During her sophomore year of college, Lathrop said one of her professors – Donna Dragon – asked her to write a “position paper” that researched the benefits of creative dance for a certain population.

“This was in early 2018 during the time when our new president was ostracizing immigrants and marginalizing them in the U.S.,” Lathrop told Reminder Publishing, about that time. “So, I chose Spanish-speaking immigrants as a population that could benefit from creative dance because of the social, emotional and cognitive benefits. Through this, I made the connection of creative movement not only bringing social-emotional benefits, but during this investigation, I discovered the importance of creative movement and physical movement to help build actual English language skills.”

Lathrop expanded her research around Spanish-speaking immigrants her junior year of school and investigated how creative dance could benefit English-learning populations outside of the U.S. through an advocacy project in her “Dance Methodology” course.

Around this time, Lathrop became interested in teaching abroad, and began looking into summer programs revolving around this. While scrolling through programs, however, she noticed the marketing of some volunteer teaching programs to be tourist-centric, and required very little experience from volunteering teachers. Lathrop found this marketing to be unethical and realized it could affect students negatively.

“Teachers who teach through volunteer tourism generally are not required to have any teacher training at all, which means teachers can resort to teacher-centered methods where students can learn passively,” said Lathrop. “Upon further investigation, I found something called the ‘native speaker fallacy,’ which is a notion that assumes that any English speaker is a natural and effective English teacher – which is of course not true.”

Through even more research, Lathrop learned about “linguistic imperialism,” which refers to the “transfer of a dominant language to other people” as a sign of power. Lathrop said she condemns this particular notion, and instead wants to teach the language in a way that allows students to maintain their cultural identity.

“Students need to be given power and agency in the classroom in their mind and body in order to maintain their sense of self-identity and cultural identity,” Lathrop said. “Inquiry methods of teaching are more interactive, authentic and thought-provoking than traditional lecture style classrooms… students are also more willing to engage when given freedom.”

Lathrop said teachers can approach movement pedagogy through several different methods including, effort actions as dance concepts, movement phrases, song lyrics and patterns, allowing students to create and perform a movement based on an English emotion word, as well as other movements that give choice to the students and engages the physical body through expression.

In one instance, Lathrop spoke of how dance concepts could be used to teach English phonemes through effort actions as a dance concept. In other instances, Lathrop may have older middle school or high school students create a movement or phrase that represents a poem they read. Through this type of method, students are learning about metaphor and abstract translation since they are creating movement based on abstract words. There are many other pedagogical methods, as well.

Prior to this program, Lathrop spent five weeks in Indonesia volunteering to teach English to second graders.

“I learned through engaging in volunteer tourism that there are so many unethical programs out there that lure people and make it seem like they are really making an impact when really they may be doing more damage than good,” said Lathrop, speaking on her time in Indonesia. “There was no curriculum, sporadic transitions between teachers and hardly any structure. So, I did my best to implement curriculum and structure in a way that empowered creativity and critical thinking in students. I taught a unit about ‘my body’ breaking down body part vocab, ‘my feelings’ where we learned emotions vocab, and ‘my relationships’ where we learned English prepositions, and ‘Who am I?’ where we learned adjectives – all through movement as the primary methodology in class.”

To Lathrop, the benefits of using creative movements to teach English learners can be broken down into the three pillars of cognitive, social, and emotional learning, but the benefits can stretch far deeper than those just those three categories.

“Learning a language-especially English, since it is given so much pressure to be learned in order to succeed in life, can be stressful and taxing on the students,” said Lathrop. “Creative movement in the class not only aids cognition but makes learning fun, engaging, and empowering.”

According to Lathrop, movement pedagogies can also improve cognitive processes such as language pronunciation and understanding by engaging the self, holistically. Biologically, kinesthetics and embodiment can aid memory and understanding of language learning. Lathrop said that the “enactment effect,” a study created in the 1980s through laboratory evidence, proved that if verbal phrases are encoded by self-performed actions, the students’ retrieval is faster and more accurate than if the phrases were simply read.

According to Lathrop, she hopes to teach American culture in Taiwan through the integration of Broadway Jazz Dance in the classroom. “I may teach an after school extracurricular dance program with a Hamilton unit, where I will teach American history and modern culture through dance and song lyrics,” said Lathrop. “History and culture topics can include the American revolution, American government, American independence, Relationships between Great Britain and America, and immigration as a political and social concept.”

Lathrop said that she will most likely be teaching elementary school while in Taiwan, but she will not know the specific school until August. While there, she hopes to create a classroom environment where students feel empowered to take risks, make choices, learn about body and space, speak up in class and learn how to love learning.

“I hope students feel confident in moving their own body and feeling powerful in their own body,” she said. “Dance is the most natural form of expression, yet oftentimes we as a society suppress that natural right to dance.”

Lathrop becomes the sixth Bridgewater State student or alum since 2017 to receive one of the Fulbright awards for teaching. She praised the extensive support she received from Jenny Shanahan, assistant provost for high-impact practices at Bridgewater, as well as Student Scholars Coordinator Sean Maguire for guiding her through the application process. Dragon and dance faculty members Jody Weber and Kristy Kuhn Donnelly wrote letters of recommendation, also. “Bridgewater has helped me in so many ways and is extremely supportive of undergraduate research,” Lathrop added.

While in Taiwan, Lathrop looks forward to further applying her creative research pedagogy. She is also looking forward to learning about Taiwanese history of dance and culture, including the educations systems and art integration that already exists. She also hopes to learn the Mandarin language.