Anne Catherine McConnell lectures to students in the Elementary Education Department at Sherbrooke University. Her courses often involve hands on learning, adapting education to the special needs of children and teaching across the curriculum that is, linking different subjects together though learning project. In the last five years she has developed a course showing how regular elementary school teachers can build community and teach different school subjects through movement and dance. This often involves using and exploring concrete materials gathered from nature and also by going out into nature with the students to experience, move, dance and learn first hand about the world around them. Here is a video of a flashmob adversing a regular dance event to be held at the University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbE4GXyUkEU

Before teaching at University, she founded and taught in Gatineau, Quebec, at the Outaouais Montessori School for twenty years, which is strongly based on hands on learning. Her teaching was also inspired by the Waldorf Method with a special emphasis on the arts and allowing children to develop a strong bond with nature. She has spent the last ten years collecting and testing dances, from all over the world that can be danced by children. Many of these dances were originally danced in a circle, outside close to nature and around a fire. She slowly discovered that by returning to the roots of these dances and dancing them when feasible, outside, it was possible to develop a strong cultural, musical and human connection with cultures from all over the world as well as to feel closer to nature.