The Transcultural Adaptation of Teaching Methods from Country of Origin to an American University Setting

Abstract

This qualitative study focuses on how and if teachers of specific traditional and modern dance forms are trained to teach and, when they teach their dances in non-professional settings outside their country of origin, if, how, and why they modify the dances and their teaching practices. Of the seven teachers in the study, each taught one of the following dance forms: Flamenco from Spain, Bharata Natyam from India, Court Dance from Cambodia, theatre and shaman dances from Korea, new and old dances from Mexico, celebration dances from West Africa, and Graham and Horton technique of American modern dance. They answered open-ended interview questions about their teacher training, processes, and goals. Neither the teachers nor their gurus had any formal training to teach. In their current university setting, these seven emphasised the cultural contexts and meanings of the dances over the precise dance skills they taught because of time constraints and their students’ non-professional goals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.