This dialogical article reflects stories of encounter. The unexpected collision of our worlds and thoughts, and the familiarities and tensions we came to recognize in each other's experiences when facilitating collaborative research in two communities of dance teachers, has given birth to this shared line of inquiry. We have come to acknowledge…

In primary schools across many countries, dance is now included within the arts key learning area with its own outcomes and content. But as future teachers of dance and other art forms, how do preservice generalist primary teachers perceive their background and confidence in relation to dance and dance education? This study investigates the…

Our field research in five contemporary dance technique classes, observing and describing the complexity and diversity involved in the traditional "demonstration-reproduction" pedagogical relationship, has led us to reconsider the role of modeling behaviour in the dance teaching context. We have also outlined recent neuroscientific…

Professionalism in Dance Education is a complex construction. It can be imposed from the outside (degree completed, job status, salary) or can be identified from the professional herself. Seven graduate dance education students were interviewed with specific focus on the transition from student to professional and the feelings surrounding this…

Despite tertiary institutions acknowledging that reflective practice is an essential component of undergraduate dance teacher training, there is often a disparity between the tertiary students' reflective skills and the more sophisticated reflective ability needed to navigate the twenty-first-century workforce. This paper charts the evolution of a…

This research investigates experiences of an international education in dance. Through the narratives of seven female dance practitioners from the southern Mediterranean region, who have trained in contemporary dance in Western cultural contexts, a multiplicity of encounters are illustrated. Two key findings emerged from the dancers' experiences.…

Integrated dance has featured in several publications from the mid-1990's onwards, particularly from the standpoints of equity of access, and contesting perceptions of dominant conventional notions of what dance is and who can dance including issues of embodiment and representation. Other publications and manuals focus primarily on how to teach…

This paper explores how young ballet dancers' bodies are constructed and narrated through their desire to become performing ballet dancers. The schooling of the balletic body engages the young dancer in embodying the discipline of ballet and in developing a particular belief in a performing body. The embodied set of acquired dispositions that are…

This case study focuses on a group of teachers' and students' opinions regarding the recent reforms in the dance department of Tainan University of Technology (TUT) in Taiwan. The author uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of forms of capital and symbolic violence to probe for the motivation, process and consequences of the changes brought about by…

In July 2010, on the crest of "The Arab Spring," 28 independent dance teachers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Malta, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, gathered in Bodrum, Turkey, for the Symposium on Dance Education in Arabic Speaking Countries. This article reflects on the symposium experience, examining the sociopolitical…

This study investigated children's perceptions of dance ability and disability and changes to perceptions following participation in an integrated dance program. Focus group interviews, field notes and observations were used with children with physical disabilities (n = 5) and without disabilities (n = 9) between the ages six and nine before and…

The understanding of the significance of movement to learning benefits from advances in neuroscience. This study considered a neurophysiological perspective in relation to the educational theory of Accelerated Learning (AL) for which little empirical evidence exists. Childhood development themes and learning strategies from a…

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 is a case study investigation into creativity involving young dancers and faculty members on the UK government-funded pre-vocational contemporary dance training programme. Qualitative research techniques were used to gather and interpret data on how individuals nurtured and viewed creativity at an individual level, as well as how the…

This paper investigates certain philosophical implications of asking a dance artist for an account of how she or he works. The research proposes the development of practices of collaborative writing by a dance artist and researcher-observer (alert to the motivated and implicated positions of each) that are capable of articulating what matters to…