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A message from the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning

Center for Leadership, Teaching and Learning (CLTL)

Spring Spotlight: Meet Periclean Faculty Leader Sarah DiPasquale

This year, the newsletter will highlight the accomplishments of Periclean Faculty Leaders across campus. is a nonprofit organization that supports civic engagement within higher education. Skidmore faculty have found myriad ways of conjoining their pedagogical missions with that of Project Pericles. There is additional teaching-related content from these interviews on the CLTL Faculty and Staff Voices webpage. Go check it out!

“Doing good for others” was the central theme that emerged in the interview with Sarah DiPasquale, associate professor and chair of the Dance Department. I would describe her as a lifelong learner who is inspired by creative pedagogies as a way to help people. DiPasquale said she “recognized the privilege” of having this platform, revealing a conscientiousness and commitment to being both learner and teacher. This reflexivity is a key piece of DiPasquale’s highly constructivist and collaborative approach to teaching. During the height of COVID, she focused on creating a community of engagement through changes in content and curriculum based on constructivist philosophies, bringing problem-solving-based learning to students through changes in technology and content, which decreased isolation among the community of remote learners.

Dance Department

This was not the first time Professor DiPasquale sought to expand a community of learning through experience-based pedagogies. Her Project Pericles course DA 374: Dancing Towards Success was wildly successful in the mission of “doing good for others.” For this project, her students created dance residencies with social justice themes within Gloversville elementary schools in New York. This program sought to apply dance in a manner that was intersectional in nature, both socially and educationally. This collaboration not only taught local students and educators with varying degrees of experience how to engage in the arts, but also taught DiPasquale’s students how to effectively communicate with a variety of community constituencies. In creating this experience, students learned to recognize their own positionalities within the context of dance, the arts, and local community engagement.

 

— Michael DeCarlen-Bumiller ’23