This is easily the girliest thing I've done in my music class.
Now, I don't mean girly in a derogatory way. Instead, I'm talking about embracing one type of feminine expression. I'm talking about teaching my students to dance to Isabella's song from Encanto, "What Else Can I Do?"
After watching Encanto with my children, I knew I wanted to explore some music from this film with my students. So, I went with "What Else Can I Do?" This song has a story arc that students can understand who had not seen the film. I am a huge fan of Diane Gurrero, and I saw this as a great opportunity to bring her immigration advocacy work into my classroom. In addition, there are some musical factors in this song that taught topics that we part of my curriculum.
I usually come up with my movement activities to songs, but for this one, I commissioned one of the fifth-grade teachers to choreograph a dance to "What Else Can I Do?" And she did a fantastic job.
I created a unit around this song. We were going to the clip from the film, and check out part of this great interview with Diane Gurrero (we stopped before the Doom Patrol stuff:
I planned to explicate the lyrics with my students and talk about how Isabella started by making roses native to Columbia to embracing making plants native to South America, symbolizing her journey.
The main part of this unit was the dance.
For the first lesson of this unit, I taught the choreography for the first part of the song without the music and without telling the students what we were doing. Then I turned on the music. Some students immediately got very excited and started jumping up and down, others were neutral unsure of what they were hearing, and others were...less excited.
As we worked through the choreography and I fully got into the dance, my energy brought the students along. Most of the choreography was not overly girly. Though there is one move which is a hair flip. I modeled it but had to ask a girl in the class who had long hair that wasn't tied up to demonstrate. The song is unapologetically feminine, and even though there are no princesses in Encanto, this song feels like it's in the canon of Disney Princess songs.
As I've been working on this song, I've noticed that some boys, at least one or two in each class, are struggling. I can see their brains trying to figure out what to do. I see this in their eyes, "okay, a man is leading a dance, but the dance is to a Disney song sung by a girl." I see their struggle in lack of energy when working on the dance, and also it is the fact that some of these boys are just sitting down in the middle of this part of the lesson and need encouragement to stand up and get moving. It is important to note that at the same time, other boys who present in heteronormative sports-loving ways are super into this dance, hair flip and all.
These are 4th and 5th-grade boys. There is a pandemic, the world is upside down, and I get that this activity is short-circuiting their conceptions of masculinity for some of them. So I'm leaning towards just letting them sit with their struggle and positively encouraging them to participate while giving them space. It feels like enough that most of the class is enjoying this activity and that they are seeing their male teacher embrace taking the role of a Disney "Princess."
We have got to take steps every day to help all our students move away from traditional ideas of gender roles. It's critical to help our students be more accepting of others and learn to love themselves. Sometimes the best way to do this is by having fun and dancing.
What else can I do?
Bring it in, bring it in…
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