Dance
Drama
Music
Visual Arts

The panoramic photographs of Manitoba landscapes in the website banners are used with the kind permission of © Stan Milosevic.

The “landscape” images and metaphor illustrated in the website banners represent current understandings about curriculum presented in the “Guiding Principles for WNCP Curriculum Framework Projects” (Western and Northern Canadian Protocol, 2011).

New ways of thinking about curriculum involve a “shift in the images we use, away from knowledge pictured as fragmented pieces put together, one piece at a time, in a linear fashion on an assembly line, to an image of knowledge as a complex organic network organized into living fields, territories or 'landscapes'. Learning about these living fields of knowledge requires: 'learning the landscape'.”

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Dance

The Dance Framework Butterfly

The Manitoba Dance Framework philosophy, essential learning areas, and learning outcomes are represented graphically and metaphorically by the image of a butterfly.

As a graphic organizer, the butterfly image forms a diagram comprising five distinct and interconnected parts: the four wings that each connect to the fifth part, the main body in the centre. Each of the wings represents one of four essential learning areas into which the learning outcomes of the Dance Framework have been classified. The central area or "body" of the butterfly, the part to which all the wings connect, represents the student as a developing dancer.

The butterfly image promotes the belief, integral to the Dance Framework, that every student's growth as a dancer and a dance-literate person can be realized through ongoing learning experiences that connect creative dance activities, technical knowledge and skill development, the building and broadening of cultural and historical understandings related to art and life, and ongoing reflective and critical thinking opportunities that focus on dance and personalized learning.

The butterfly also functions as a metaphor for dance and dance education, alluding to transformation, selfactualization, visual beauty, and resilience. The butterfly image may stimulate many other associations by those who encounter this Dance Framework; such generative thinking is fitting for a framework intended as an impetus to creative and personalized learning.