This paper investigates the evolution of feminist consciousness in dance technique class as related to body image, the myth of the perfect body, and the development of feminist pedagogy. Western concert dance forms have often been taught in a manner where imitating the teacher is primary in the learning process. In this traditional scenario,…

This essay explores the numerous and diverse ways collaborative practices in dance research can unfold. Strengths and challenges within the collaborative process are discussed as emphasis is given to the multiple perspectives and types of relationships that evolve from and within the process. These core elements offer scholars a rich array of…

This article explores ways of learning experienced by university dance students participating in a community dance project. The students were unfamiliar with community-based practices and found themselves needing to remediate held attitudes about dance. How the students came to approach their learning within the dance-making process drew on…

Preparing dance specialist teachers to successfully educate an increasingly diverse student population highlights a number of challenges within an educational policy landscape characterized by technical production, methods-centric teacher preparation, teacher-proof curriculum, and standardization. The ramifications of these policies have…

Today's dance educators enter classrooms populated by increasingly diverse students in which teachers' pedagogical knowledge necessitates heightened understandings of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexuality. Uncovering taken-for-granted assumptions, dominant stereotypes, and educational structures that reproduce social…

The technique class can be an amalgam of frustration and joy, cautious imitation and mindless replication, being right and being wrong. Competing requisites, such as a desire for expressive freedom in relation to the demand that a movement be precisely structured, can unwittingly create a tension between teachers and students. The reasons for such…

Reconstructions are critical in giving body to the history of dance. For student dancers, participating in reconstructions is a participation in both the legacy of dance and in dance as a form of cultural discourse. When choreographers generate movement vocabulary and improvisational parameters together with performers, the resulting collaborative…