This article describes the inaugural symposium of the Arnhold Institute for Dance Education Research, Policy & Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City (USA). Titled 'Pioneering Visions for Access and Equity in Dance Education,' the symposium focused on seminal Black and African-American histories that, though they…

Diplomacy is the art of relationships: the ability to work with individual to international-level concerns in a sensitive way. Like the diplomat, dance artists and educators know that success requires sensitivity to rapidly changing situational demands. A growing body of research suggests that the nonverbal art form of dance can be an effective…

This article describes a relationship-based dance program, "Moving Parents and Children Together," and summarizes a 3-year study of teacher practice and parent-child interactions. Our work focuses on "relational engagement" in dance, which entails a person's basic motivation to connect plus a psychological investment in…

In the past decade, much has been written about threats to boys' and girls' healthy participation in dance. This Viewpoints essay considers some of the causes and proposed remedies, which focus almost exclusively on the roles and responsibilities of dance educators and administrators. I suggest that what is missing from recent research,…

This essay explores factors influencing high-quality teaching in dance. The author argues that deficiencies in the skills needed to teach the content of dance (i.e., pedagogical knowledge) pose a bigger threat to effective instruction than familiarity with the subject being taught (i.e., content knowledge). The process of learning to teach not…

What does it means to be a caring dance teacher? The essay reviews the rise of care in education and examines the concept of care as a moral orientation in personal and educational encounters so that connections to dance education are revealed, definitions are arrived at, and important related issues are identified. The essay describes three…

The "Critical Thinking Belief Appraisal" was administered to practicing dance teachers (n = 52) in the USA to investigate their beliefs (and use of) critical-thinking activities with high-advantage and low-advantage learners. Results point to an "advantage effect" in dance teachers' beliefs about critical thinking: the higher…

Reviews the contributions of Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) to dance education by placing MI theory in the context of historical perspectives on intelligences and examining the assumptions behind traditional models of intelligence and some of the more recent pluralistic approaches. The paper reviews the principal tenets of MI…

This paper describes new approaches to assessment in dance and dance education. The first part examines assumptions behind traditional models of evaluation in academic and performing arts contexts. I consider whether it is useful to understand human ability as unitary or if it is meaningful to evaluate people according to a single dimension of…