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…

This article elucidates a pedagogical formulation delineating the collaborative, relational, and process-oriented nature of viewing dance as a practice-as-research (PaR) enquiry emanating in the field of South Asian Dance Studies. Being an "Odissi" practitioner, an Indian classical dance form from the eastern Indian state of Odisha, I…

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…

Dancers in India come from a background that focuses on performance and are trained to teach the way they were taught. When such dancers join a K-12 space as dance educators, they need to find new ways of teaching dance and movement. The teaching strategies employed in a dance studio, institute, or under a guru vary immensely from the strategies…

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…

Since the 1970s, scientific researchers have shown that the nature and practice of the knowledge being taught plays an important role in the organization of teaching. Teaching content, first in mathematics, then in physical education, has become the object of scientific research in didactics in France. This research questions the commonplace…

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),…