This article reflects on a week-long staff professional development program at Tezpur University), Assam, India, conducted during mid-December 2023. As a focus of the professional development, staff from the Cultural Studies Department along with visiting academics and staff from other departments at Tezpur University learned how to teach…

When the traditional (dance) and the modern (university) intersect within the Liberal Arts, the pedagogical dynamics produced opens possible pathways to approach decolonization as an ongoing praxical pedagogical process. This un-archival unruly lived experience of decolonization proposes a possibility of evoking Indian pasts against the misuses of…

In light of recent attempts to defend the role of the arts in education against the effects of policies based on utilitarian principles, this paper examines the arts educational writings and practical projects of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) at Santiniketan in West Bengal, showing how they were motivated by a Romantic and Upanishadic philosophy…

The questions that this paper poses are placed at the intersection of a Liberal Arts approach to education and the pedagogy of traditional Indian dance forms. These questions are explored through my ongoing pedagogical experiment with teaching the art of "abhinaya" in the university classroom. This paper charts the journey of exploring…

This article opens up questions around introducing Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance, to undergraduate learners within a North American university setting. The aim is to observe how the learners understood and received a particular cultural practice and to explore issues related to learning goals, curriculum content, approaches to…

This article focuses on the need for a differentiated curriculum for classical dance courses and a curriculum for undergraduate students in the liberal education framework. It begins with a retrospective analysis of dance pedagogy with a specific focus on its evolution in ancient India and reiterates the need for modifying dance discourses in a…

This paper is a reflection on the process of dance choreography, an assignment for pedagogical evaluation at postgraduate level in an Indian university. It is also a recapitulation and reconstruction of my experiences while undergoing a Master's course in Bharatanatyam (a style of classical dance) in the Centre for Performing Arts (CPA),…