Isolated contexts in Australia as an impetus for enhancing learning motivation through creative movement

The COVID pandemic provided the impetus for many educators to revisit learning strategies especially in contexts, where traditional and structured forms of teaching were inhibited due to imposed lockdowns. This paper reports on a study that investigated the benefits of creative movement to the well-being, motivation, and academic outcomes for secondary educators during imposed periods of isolation from traditional learning contexts. The researchers explored the utility and value of two learning strategies during periods of unexpected and sudden imposed isolation. To achieve this N=18 secondary teachers participated online to learn a poem through either a Creative Movement (CM) Task where they learnt dance moves that corresponded to lines from the poem or through a Read and Revise (RR) Task, where participants only read lines from the poem and tried to remember them. The data gathered included academic scores from pre and post testing of the poem, and well-being scores measuring how participants felt before and after participating in either the CM or RR Task. We hypothesized that participants in the creative movement group would outperform the read and revise group, however data analysis indicated that both groups demonstrated similar and statistically significant improvement. Further, satisfaction scores improved, in addition to well-being and motivation scores, though not significantly, and the retention of content was aided by both intervention types. Overall, the results indicate that incorporating movement with academic learning, may enhance a greater sense of satisfaction in learning, and might be a viable strategy in the classroom.