A Dancer's Leap to Public School Teacher

By Abigail Green

Teaching never held much appeal for Emily Giza, visual and performing arts '96 and instructional systems development '02, a lifelong dancer who trained with the former Baltimore Ballet Company and at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA). "I wanted to dance for me, I didn't want to teach dance," she says. Fast-forward several years to the summer of 2003, and Giza is glowing after having just completed her first year as a fifth grade teacher at Federal Hill Preparatory School in Baltimore City. So how did a dancer make the leap to public school teacher? You might say her path was more improvised than choreographed.

Despite her training, Giza almost ditched dancing altogether after high school. In her senior year at BSA, she was sidelined by an injury and discouraged by the constant competition. "I wanted nothing to do with dance," says Giza. She decided enroll at UMBC, where her parents James Giza, history '71, and Joanne Giza, English, '71 had gone, and major in history, like her father.

With her mother's encouragement, Giza signed up for a dance class. She ran into a dance major who recognized her from high school. "She asked me to be in her senior project, and I did it," says Giza. "That spring, she basically marched me into academic services, and I declared my major as dance." At UMBC, Giza performed with the Phoenix Dance Company and worked with dance professors Doug Hamby, Carol Hess and Elizabeth Walton. Giza also participated in Project REACH, doing dance workshops and performances in local schools. Giza was one of only two dance majors in the class of 1996.

After college, Giza set off for New York City to work at Juilliard, first in production administration and then as a wardrobe supervisor. A couple of years later, she moved back to Baltimore to work for Center Stage. She joined a local dance company and looked up her former professor Hess, who invited her to dance in her video, "Shibboleth," which was filmed in a cornfield. "I loved working with her," says Giza. "Carol can ask me to dance in a cornfield and I'll do it."

To supplement her income, Giza began teaching at several local dance schools and at the BSA after-school dance program she'd attended as a child, while also working at a coffee shop, a health club and Kennedy Krieger Institute.

When the head of outreach programs at BSA asked Giza to teach creative movement, an introductory dance class, at Barclay Elementary School in Charles Village, she agreed. "That was really challenging because I was used to teaching ballet, which is very structured. This was harder because the kids had to learn discipline." Though Giza enjoyed the experience, she wished she could spend more time with her students. She also noticed that many of them were struggling academically.

"Something inside of me clicked," says Giza. "I went to the principal and said, 'I'm interested in getting to know the kids more — I want to be in the classroom.'" He put her in touch with a colleague who suggested Giza look into UMBC's Urban Teacher Education Program. When she was accepted, Giza dropped everything to commit full-time to graduate classes and practice teaching.

She was assigned to team-teach second grade at Dickey Hill Elementary/Middle School with UMBC alumnus Nick Gough, M.A. instructional systems development '01, who had just completed the two-year UTE program.

"You see the entire school year from beginning to end," says Giza, who concurrently took graduate education classes twice a week at UMBC and taught classes on Saturdays with two other interns. "It was much more beneficial for me to team-teach with two other interns. It was great to watch them interact with kids and pick things up from them," says Giza.

She credits the UTE program's hands-on experience for making her more at ease in the classroom during her first year of teaching. "We had to write lesson plans, do readings, and had lots of discussions. But I learned more in the classroom dealing with the kids that I did in my actual graduate classes," says Giza.

In 2002, Giza got a job at Federal Hill Preparatory School in Baltimore City. She enjoys teaching 10- and 11-year-olds, both in the dance studio and the classroom, she says. "It's that age where they're still young enough that they like stickers and playing games, but they're old enough to write and read and talk to you about a book."

According to school principal Sharon VanDyke, Giza had "a wonderful year." "Being an intern for an entire year with another teacher certainly helped prepare her," says VanDyke. "But she's a natural teacher."

Although she no longer makes her living dancing, Giza has found a way to combine her passions. She taught her students a dance routine to a Run DMC song for the school's holiday show. "They loved it," she says. "They were the hit of the show."