[Tango-L] Qualifying Tango Instructors

[Joe Grohens]

 > So how about testing instructors for their competance in teaching  
Tango?

Floyd -

With all the smiley faces and stuff it sounds like your "modest  
proposal" is ironic, though I'm not sure.

Certification in many areas of teaching and learning is a good thing,  
I believe. And certificates for completion of varying levels of  
training in Argentine Tango do exist.

. Tango Discovery (Mauricio Castro) has a certification track
    http://www.tangodiscovery.com/TD2/English/program.htm

. DVIDA offers teacher certification using Christe Cote's syllabus
   http://prodvida.com/association/certification_exams/

. Ive Simard's syllabus is designed for certification.
   http://www.elmundodeltango.com/syllabus/syllabus.html

. Other schools offer various types of certificates for completion of  
training. For example, Mingo & Esther Pugliese have done this.

People who want to set themselves up as teachers of tango can do so  
without qualification, obviously. They don't need credentials,  
authorization from anyone, or even much understanding of the dance. If  
people learn how to dance from them, great. If people fail to learn  
how to dance from them, well, really, so what? It's only a dance.

But I sometimes think that a generally accepted outline of minimal  
competencies in tango dancing and tango teaching would be a beneficial  
guideline to these amateur tango teachers. Getting "general  
acceptance" in the tango world has always been the hard part.

In principle, a comprehensive system of training tango dancers could  
and should produce good dancers and good teachers of dancers. Do the  
published teaching systems accomplish this? I think it often happens,  
for example, that bad dancing is the result of cataloging steps and  
classifying styles and techniques. Following syllabi like these can  
lead teachers and their pupils to focus on memorizing information (and  
yes, patterns) rather than on learning how to dance.

The validity of different training systems for tango is always open to  
challenge, of course. Which may seem to make certification pointless.  
But the value of certification systems for tango could be, in my view,  
not so much for the certificate to be recognized by anyone, but more  
to provide path for individuals to develop their abilities.

An interesting question to ask in the case of Argentine Tango is, who  
accredited the certifiers in the first place?