DANCE ACTIVITY AS BODY LANGUAGE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY IN CHILDREN WITH DOWN SYNDROME

Considering the difficulties and limitations that Down’s Syndrome individuals have and taking into account historic-cultural theory’s contributions to understand the voluntary memory as fundamental to human development, it has been investigated the role played by dance, as a body language that allows the symbolic expressions on the memory’s building and development in Down’s Syndrome individuals. Therefore, a single group with three Down individuals was formed, aged between 9 and 12 years old, regularly enrolled in a APAE. It has been held 20 intervention meetings in order to identify and analyze, if there were changes in the subjects’s actions, from their movements, body and oral expressions throughout the intervention process. Thinking about the whole process of conducting this research, we’ve noticed that one of the consistent findings we’ve got is that, when we point out the subjects’s biological difficulties and we’ve agreed on them, we could, despite of the contradictions imposed by the social and educational reality, say that subject’s biological laws can be overcome from the social relations that one establishes in the course of his life, since the Down’s Syndrome subjects own the capacity to develop their psychic ability, even if slowly, and therefore, proceed from the interventions allowed by the physical education teacher, to propose the dance as an educational ctivity.