Advising

A dance adviser helps students assess passions and skills for planning a career in the field of dance.

Faculty advisement goes beyond advice for scheduling classes. A dance adviser helps look at academic and professional long term goals. Personal strengths and passions are measured with skills and career options needed to realize goals after college. Each year connections with alumni, professionals, and guest artists help you and your adviser determine your direction.

You are assigned a First Year Adviser who works closely with you during your first year. If you move from a pre-dance major status to a dance major status, you will be placed with a dance faculty for your remaining tenure as a BFA candidate.

Degree Progress and Artistic Assessment

Towson University has an online system of tracking and communicating degree progress for each student. This Degree Progress Assessment is used with each adviser/advisee communication with the Registrar. The software carefully tracks each student's progress through the dance major. It also allows students to track their own progress with accuracy. 

There are a series of milestones that each dance major will reach and achieve during the journey to graduation. 

  • Acceptance into Towson University
  • Successful audition into the pre-dance major status
  • Successful completion of Dance Foundational Coursework with an earned grade of "B" or 3.0 average
  • Completion of Degree Juries
  • Performance units earned (15)
  • For the PreK-12 certification, successful completion of the Praxis, Internship and Portfolio 

The dance faculty have high expectations that you will put forth your best effort to grow. However, assessment is not based on effort, but on the clearly articulated criteria offered within each class syllabus. Each syllabus establishes a contract between the student and the faculty as to the goals, expectations, content and assessment of that particular course.

As a dance major students will:

  • Build professional habits for healthy technical achievement and somatic understanding 
  • Analyze, intuit, produce, deliver, and evaluate the creative process for original dance choreography
  • Demonstrate oral and written skills, information literacy, critical thinking in aesthetic language, and historical/worldview perspectives
  • Define, invent, teach and evaluate the craft of age and latent appropriate pedagogy skills
  • Recognize, choose and demonstrate leadership skills