Through our research in the Choreographing Science project, we made progress in two major areas:

  • What was learned in our camps, and how the design of the camps—bringing dance and coding together as a way of modeling scientific research—made that learning possible.
    • Coding is not more scientific than dance and they can be especially useful to each other. Developing choreography led to questions about digital models and coding digital models let to questions about choreography.
    • Adults are not smarter than kids and they learn together and from each other. In our camps, middle schoolers learned from professional scientists and professional scientists learned from middle schoolers. When the professional scientists explained parts of their research, their verbal explanations were not taken as finalized knowledge and instead sparked further inquiry.
    • Small parts within a larger system move in ways that together create the larger system. In our camps, the work of figuring out movement rules for a human dancer and for a digital agent helped participants understand this complexity and explain it to their audience.
    • Uncertainty or not knowing are OK feelings to have. In our camps, quiet forms of participation were taken up in the camp in ways that furthered the group’s scientific inquiry. 
  • What was learned—through our process of studying the camps—about analyzing embodied learning ourselves as an interdisciplinary group of embodied sensemakers.
    • We can use choreographic tools to dance in response to recordings of people learning through movement.
    • We can interview artists to properly cite art in the academic research (and writing) process.

Findings – publications & presentations

Wagh, A., Vogelstein, L., & Champion, D. (2024). Fused Representations: Linking Choreographic and Digital NetLogo Modeling through Intermodal Inquiry. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2024, pp. 714-721. International Society of the Learning Sciences.

In this piece, we share an example of the kind of scientific models created during our camps through collaborations of middle schoolers, professional scientists, and professional choreographers: a two-part model of the scientific research topic of how the cells in a spine behave before—and after—an injury. 

One part of the model was a digitally-coded, made in the programming platform NetLogo, as rules for agents or “turtles” to enact. The other part was choreographed physically, as a dance performed by humans. Both parts were important, as one of the middle schoolers explains:

“If we didn’t have our dance, our Netlogo wouldn’t be like– it would still make sense, it just wouldn’t be as clear. But if– and if we didn’t have the NetLogo, our dance wouldn’t be as clear, ‘cause it’s like helpful to see like one perspective from another, like real life and computer.” (Brandi, age XX)“Well [NetLogo and choreography offer] different things because like some things you can’t really do in NetLogo, so you would have to do it with your body or explaining with your words, but some things you can’t do in real life because it’s more like a computer thing than a person thing. […] Oh, like how […] we had less people than, but in NetLogo you can just–  [code] 200 turtles and then 200 turtles would pop up.” (Brandi, age XX)

Read this paper if you want to learn more about:

  • What happened in the first iteration of our camp
  • An example of what kids, professional scientists, and professional choreographers made together
  • An example of how kids and professional scientists can use their bodies to make helpful suggestions during scientific inquiry
  • Theoretical connections between agent based modeling and choreographic modeling

Vogelstein, L., Champion, D., Wagh, A., & Appleby, L. (2024). Growing into Collective Forms of Scientific Inquiry: The Dignifying Affirmation of Timid, Half-baked Ideas. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2024, pp. 1179-1182. International Society of the Learning Sciences.

It can be easy to pay attention to the loudest person—or boldest dancer—in a room, but this means that we may miss ideas which are often expressed more quietly, such as those which are valuable but still somewhat raw. 

In this piece, we share an example—from the Choreographing Science camp—of a relatively quiet form of participation being taken up in in ways that helped the group get even more ideas and ask even more questions. A middle schooler suggested that the biomechanics of walking was “like a puppet”, and the group engaged in discussions and dance-research to explore marionettes as tools for thinking about biomechanics.

Read this paper if you want to learn more about:

  • The kinds of dance-based activities that grew from youth ideas during our camps
  • Why paying attention to quieter forms of participation is important in supporting learning and creativity
  • How choreographic tools can support scientific inquiry

Vogelstein, L., Wagh, A., Champion, D. (2025). Towards Expansive and Equitable Modeling: Syncretic Modeling through the Lenses of Dance, Science, and Computation. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2025, pp. 1449-1453. International Society of the Learning Sciences.

When experts speak, their words are often taken as the end of a story, rather than the beginning of one. At the Choreographing Science camps, we were excited to see that when the professional scientists explained their research at the Choreographing Science camps, professional scientists’ explanations instead sparked further inquiry.

In this piece, we share a story of a professional scientist’s explanation serving as a beginning that youth could expand on through choreographic tools. We argue that this building-on-explanations rather than taking them as finalized knowledge happened because normal barriers between science and dance were absent, movement and computation were both available for sense-making, and youth and adults could together learn and collaborate in their investigations.

Read this paper if you want to learn more about:

  • What happened in the first iteration of our camp
  • An example of how kids, scientists, and choreographers engaged in embodied scientific inquiry together
  • An example of how authentic scientific modeling can center kids’ ideas and perspectives
  • Theoretical connections between agent based modeling and choreographic modeling

Vogelstein, L., Steinberg, R., Thomas, C., Champion, D., Wagh, A., & Appleby, L. (2024). Cultivating care through choreographic forms of interaction analysis. In Love, C. & Jen, T. symposium, Caring Relations Across Interaction Analysis Labs. Published in the proceedings of the International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting 2024.

This piece presents dancing as a form of analysis of video recordings of youth learning.

Usually researchers study video recordings of youth learning by watching the videos while sitting still. To more fully embrace the embodied aspects of sensemaking, we started using choreographic tools to dance in response to the recordings we wanted to analyze.

By engaging with our data as works of dance, we find ourselves able to appreciate not only the content but also the tone and texture of people’s contributions when learning in a group. We see this approach as way to express and reinforce care towards all the beings involved.

Read this symposium if you want to learn more about:

  • What it means to collaborate with artists as co-researchers
  • Ethical considerations in qualitative methods for video analysis

Vogelstein, L., Burley, X., Springer, A., Champion, D., Wagh, A., Steinberg, R., & Varone, D. (2024). Leveraging co-analysis to disrupt normative citation practices in interdisciplinary collaborations with artists. In Pierson, A., & Keifert, D. T. symposium, Co-Research in Video Analysis: Shifts Towards Ethical Validity. Published in the proceedings of the International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting 2024.

We were writing a research paper about a dance-science activity from one of the Choreographing Science camps when we got stuck. We wanted to write about a choreographic tool we used in the camp, but we couldn’t do it in the normal way we write academic papers—we had no way to formally reference where that choreographic tool came from. 

For us, this highlighted the different ways knowledge is held and passed on in the arts and sciences: Academics do it through papers, so they can quickly reference those papers in their future writing, but most dancers and choreographers do it by talking and dancing with each other. That’s why when we were writing about ideas that dancers have developed, there was nothing written down to point to as evidence that the idea has existed—and who developed it.

As scholars committed to developing ethical partnerships with collaborators working in an interdisciplinary team, we felt like we had to fix this. So we came up with an idea which we share here.

Read this symposium if you want to learn more about:

  • How we think about the ethics of interdisciplinary research partnerships with artists
  • Developing ethical research partnerships

Vogelstein, L. (2024). Using Choreographic Lenses to Provide Evidence of (Embodied) Learning: Pushing beyond word-based evidence of changes in participation. In Vogelstein, L. & Woods, P. symposium, Doing Learning Sciences Research In & Through the Arts. Published in the proceedings of the International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting 2024.

In learning environments where dance and movement are used as ways of thinking, it isn’t always obvious from people’s words alone what they learned.

As artist-scholars who design and study these environments, we had to find evidence of learning in the way people move instead of what they have to say. We share some ideas about that in this piece.

Read this symposium if you want to learn more about:

  • Methods for researching embodied learning
  • Research about art learning that uses artistic methods

Research Talks

Moving Through Uncertainty: Ensemble, choreographic resources for sensemaking – University at Buffalo Learning Sciences Speaker Series

One of the special features of the Choreographing Science camps is that uncertainty or not knowing were ok feelings to have. They didn’t stop kids, in particular, from contributing to the group’s scientific investigations. In fact, sometimes when people say they don’t know, what they mean is that they don’t know specific jargon or terms, when in fact they do know lots of related things that could be helpful. When we broaden knowing to include more than just technical terms, to include things like knowing in our bodies, we can move through feelings of uncertainty in ways that allow more people and more ideas to further scientific discoveries. 

Watch & listen to this talk if you want to know more about:

  • Physical Research as a thing that some professional dancers do
  • An example of science-based physical research
  • Some of the theories of embodiment and learning that inform this project
  • What scientist collaborators had to say about being part of the Choreographing Science camps
  • Some of the methods used on this research project

Dance with/as Technology: Designing to Support Expansive STEAM Learning – Teachers College, Columbia University, Technology, Media, & Learning Brown Bag Series January 2025 

Dance with/as Technology: Designing to Support Expansive STEAM Learning – Teachers College, Columbia University, Technology, Media, & Learning Brown Bag Series January 2025  

This talk is about what it meant to use dance and coding (computational modeling) together in our camps. The kinds of dance and coding we drew on both emphasize the dynamic movements that small parts within larger systems make and how those movements create an entire system together. By bringing dance and coding together as a way of modeling scientific research, we were able to change how science can be done and how people can learn about science at the same time. This meant that coding was not thought of as more scientific than dance and adults were not thought of as smarter than kids. 

Watch & listen to this talk if you want to know more about:

  • Non-digital technologies
  • Design theories that informed this project
  • An example of hybrid dance-coding embodied thinking