Dancing and nursing come together to understand spaces, how we move in them and how we learn

Coralee McLaren sees a whole world of knowledge waiting to be discovered at the intersection of art and science. As a former dancer and now a nurse-scientist in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing (DCSN), embodied ways of knowing, proximity and the notion of synchrony have been foundational to her teaching and research. I caught up with her on the phone after teaching two introductory nursing courses online this past year. “These students were amazing. Most were attending university for the first time, plus figuring out how to learn, study and get to know one another in a distant, virtual environment. That demands resilience, perseverance and creativity -- all great qualities of a nurse.”  

McLaren is a classically trained dancer in the Martha Graham technique. Following her decade-long career with Toronto Dance Theatre, she noticed that her movement background influenced her observations of children as a pediatric nurse. “When I watch children move I sense their responses in my own body, and how changes in rhythm and tempo trigger new ways of moving and interacting.” It is no surprise then that McLaren is focused on bringing the worlds of dance and nursing together to examine how the body moves, how we move with others and how we learn.    

McLaren has released a knowledge translation video about this research (external link) . Advances in neuroimaging suggest that children learn best when they move in synchronous ways. The design of learning spaces is critical to promoting these interactions, and particularly for children with physical dis/abilities. “It’s something I have been worrying about during this pandemic. For 18 months students have been physically detached from one another. We know how isolation impacts social well-being and mental health. We know less about how physical distance affects learning.” McLaren suggests that an interdisciplinary approach including dancers, nurses, health scientists and educators is needed to rethink physical and virtual spaces. This work draws on recent CIHR, SSHRC and Faculty of Community Services (FCS) project grants that extend her doctoral and postdoctoral work at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital from 2006-2015.   

McLaren’s mentors Patricia McKeever (external link)  (childhood disability) and Geoffrey Edwards (external link)  (cognitive geomatics) offer a range of theoretical and methodological expertise supporting this research program. “McKeever encourages me to link my dancing past with my work with dis/abled children to challenge medical understandings of their physical, social and cognitive capacities. Edwards asks me to consider how physical and virtual spaces invite and effect new movement and learning.” McLaren emphasized how COVID-19 has heightened the urgency of this research. “Our encounters with one another have radically changed this past year, so we must respond in an equally radical way by generating interdisciplinary research that completely upends our understanding of body-space relationships.”

McLaren hosts a yearly event that brings together The Creative School at Ryerson, formerly the Faculty of Communication and Design (FCAD), dance and FCS nursing students to discuss their perceptions of movement and space from diverse points of view. Although COVID-19 interrupted the Winter 2021 event, her ongoing aim is to move students out of their silos to gain new insights into their seemingly diverse programs of study. “Nursing is both an art and a science which in turn demands that the human body be understood from biomedical, social and artistic perspectives. Dance students are conscious of their bodies and movement in highly attuned, intuitive ways. Nursing students have in-depth anatomical and physiological knowledge of the human body. Dancers and nurses alike move in spaces that profoundly affect what occurs there. There is so much to talk about here!” Together with the director of Performance Dance at The Creative School, Vicki St. Denys, McLaren is currently developing a course that formalizes this cross-talk, in-depth discussions, and focused learning on interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and optimizing movement in novel spaces.  

For McLaren, curiosity is essential. “To be a critical thinker, you need to be curious - no matter what your primary discipline is.” She insists that dancers and nurses must constantly question and challenge traditional understandings of how the body moves, how we learn and how we view human capacity. “We should take our lead from children as movement experts. They are notoriously curious and yearn for ways to synchronize with others - physically, socially and cognitively. To me, they always appear to be dancing in some form or another.” Perhaps we have all become dancers during this health crisis -- navigating movement, space, distance and encounters in ways that we’ve never had to think about -- until now. For McLaren, “that’s an opening for radical change.”