The Dance Inquiry Podcast

Maker educator Paula Mitchell chats with dance teaching artists Alisa Rasera and Heather Stockton about the inclusive and community-based dance program they helped develop at Grass Valley Elementary.

For this episode we invited two teaching colleagues, Jessica Kershner and Aiano Nakagawa, to tell their story about how they partnered together to bring dance into an early childhood inclusion classroom in an Oakland public school.

Join hosts Jochelle Pereña, a dance teaching artist and Professional Learning Manager and Heather Stockton, a dance teaching artist and choreographer as they dive into conversations between artist educators around what sparks curiosity, creativity and consciousness in their teaching. 

Pereña and Stockton are both with Luna Dance Institute, a dance education non-profit in Berkeley, CA with a mission to bring creativity, community and equity to every child’s life through the art of dance.

In these inaugural episodes we’ll be focusing on access and disability issues in dance education. And this very first episode invites two of our colleagues, Alisa Rasera and Cindy Miner Kapelke, who are fellow local leaders in advocating for access for children with special needs. Both are educators and dancers, and both are alumni from Luna’s Summer Institute. Recently they co-facilitated a Luna Practitioner Exchange on Teaching Dance from a Distance: Special Ed and Inclusion, and it was from that conversation that the idea of this podcast was born.

This podcast is produced by Luna Dance Institute.