Cheryl Glazebrook is learning a new dance for TEDx
The FKRM professor is ready to share her thoughts on why everyone should dance more
Dr. Cheryl Glazebrook says preparing for her upcoming TEDx talk on May 29 feels like learning a new dance.
“It’s a connection of the dance part of my life and my profession as a professor,” says the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management professor. “I’m practicing where I’m going to go, where I’m going to look, what I’m going to say, and so it feels more like getting ready to dance.”
Dance is the central theme of Glazebrook’s talk, which will explore how it can transcend age and ability as a joyful, inclusive way to connect and grow. A dancer her whole life, Glazebrook sees this talk as her two worlds coming together.
“It’s pulling so much from my own life and my own experiences,” she says. “This is the first opportunity for things to come full circle and share that connection across these different areas.”
Glazebrook says her passion for dance and her passion for research have often been orbiting each other. During her undergrad at McMaster University, she spent up to twenty hours a week in the dance studio with the school’s modern dance company.
However, dance has slowly been integrating itself more presently in Glazebrook’s work. She assisted in developing the new Experiencing Dance History course, and along with AHS PhD grad Dr. Jaqueline Ladwig, she helped publish Community-Informed Recommendations to Developing Inclusive Dance Opportunities: Engaging Community, Dance, and Rehabilitation Experts Using a Hybrid-Delphi Method.
Both focus on ways that dance can be used as a tool to further explore social topics like history and culture, and areas like rehabilitation for different communities.
“It is different for me to more personally share the journey about how I ended up in this career and why I love it so much,” she says. “I think that’s a privilege of being in academia, that we get to study what we love.”
Glazebrook, approaching the end of a six-month research leave, sees the upcoming talk as “almost like a capstone project.” She says she has spent the time filling in the background knowledge about dance literature and research to further look at neurodiversity and motor sequence learning in the Perceptual Motor Integration Lab.
“We’re exploring the diversity of learning and what that looks like for different people,” she says. “I’m really hoping this can become something that brings us together across different areas.”
Glazebrook says through the lab’s research, they’ve identified a gap for more inclusive and adaptive programming across various areas for people with different capabilities, whether it’s from a traumatic brain injury, stroke, neurodiversity, or more developmental. She says that programming doesn’t always need to be dance, but it provides a good place to start.
Glazebrook will give her TEDx talk during the third presenter block of the day, which begins after lunch on May 29.