TEKS Dance 6

(1) The fine arts incorporate the study of dance, music, theatre, and the visual arts to offer unique experiences and empower students to explore realities, relationships, and ideas. These disciplines engage and motivate all students through active learning, critical thinking, and innovative problem solving. The fine arts develop cognitive functioning and increase student academic achievement, higher-order thinking, communication, and collaboration skills, making the fine arts applicable to college readiness, career opportunities, workplace environments, social skills, and everyday life. Students develop aesthetic and cultural awareness through exploration, leading to creative expression. Creativity, encouraged through the study of the fine arts, is essential to nurture and develop the whole child.

(2) Four basic strands--foundations: perception; creative expression; historical and cultural relevance; and critical evaluation and response--provide broad, unifying structures for organizing the knowledge and skills students are expected to acquire. Dance students develop perceptual thinking and movement abilities in daily life, promoting an understanding of themselves and others. Students develop movement principles and technical skills and explore choreographic and performance qualities. Students develop self-discipline and healthy bodies that move expressively, efficiently, and safely through space and time with a sensitive kinesthetic awareness. Students recognize dance as a vehicle for understanding historical and cultural relevance, increasing an awareness of their heritage and traditions and those of others, and enabling them to participate in a diverse society. Evaluating and analyzing dance allows students to strengthen decision-making skills, develop critical and creative thinking, and develop artistic creative processes. Students continue to explore technology and its application to dance and movement, enabling them to make informed decisions about dance.

(3) Statements that contain the word "including" reference content that must be mastered, while those containing the phrase "such as" are intended as possible illustrative examples.