Rethinking the pedagogy of dance pedagogy

Abstract

Many graduate dance programmes require a pedagogy course to ensure that graduate students, who are future faculty, have the capacity to successfully educate the next generation of dance practitioners. The majority of graduate dance programmes in the United States prioritise Western theatrical forms, yet increasingly there is a call to decolonise dance curricula by broadening the scope of dance forms present in degree programmes. For this to happen, graduate programmes must make space for students to rigorously develop as postsecondary dance educators. In graduate teaching courses, this requires a shift away from ‘best practices’, which may unintentionally privilege Western constructs of dance and pedagogy, and towards cultivating ethical approaches for dance teaching that reflect teachers’ personal and cultural values, the aesthetics of a given dance form, and the community of students being taught. Using an autoethnographic approach in combination with qualitative content analysis, this article examines a dance educator’s journey revising her approach from one that instills ‘best practices’ for teaching modern or postmodern dance techniques to a model that develops graduate students’ competencies as ethical dance educators and embraces a range of dance forms. This pedagogical shift is requisite for approaching equity in tertiary dance education.

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