This article aims to examine the integration of Students as Partners (SaP) in dance education. An SaP teaching framework has been embraced by academic educators from various disciplines to improve engaged learning. To encourage autonomy and choice making in their education, students can partner with faculty to design a dance curriculum.…

Professor Wade Madsen has been teaching at Cornish College of the Arts since 1985. This article serves as a window into his educational approach to teaching advanced choreography.

This article critically explores two dance educators' reflections of difference in dance learning and teaching. We pose the question, How as educators might we facilitate and view difference? What have we learned in our teaching practices that aims to celebrate difference? Through the sharing of narratives and reflections about our experiences of…

Teaching the creative process through analysis and understanding of one's choreographic research inspires and motivates students to create their own meaningful movement.

This article utilizes interviews with three teaching artists to interpret their lived experiences of teaching dance classes within New Zealand prisons. Prison environments and prison cultures create a multitude of challenges, such as the physical environment itself, social dynamics and hierarchy, and interaction and relationships with incarcerated…

In 2016, professors representing Biology, Dance, Music, and Theatre and dance program students created "Dunes," a performance piece that depicts the ecological succession of Michigan's sand dunes. The process used to make this work is a direct representation of the steps that Team Hyena Puppet, a collective of teaching artists and…

Drawn from the authors' larger study of teaching artists in dance and theatre arts (Anderson and Risner, Hybrid Lives), this analysis investigated participants' (n = 172) attitudes and beliefs about the need and relevance of a teaching artist credential or certificate. Data were obtained through an in-depth, online survey, electronic…

Since 1999, when the author first started teaching creative process-based dance programs in public schools, she has struggled to find the time to teach children the basic concepts and tools of dance while teaching them to be deliberate with their choreographic choices. In this article, the author describes a process that helps students and…

This case study is drawn from the authors' ongoing international study of teaching artists in dance and theatre. The study takes an in-depth look at teaching artists' artistic and academic preparation in dance and theatre, entry into the teaching artist field, rewards, challenges, and assessment of their work, and their professional development,…

As a percussive dancer, Malke Rosenfeld makes rhythm with her feet while she dances, and she also helps elementary students make their own percussive dance steps by integrating mathematics into her lesson plans. To do this she uses the Jump Patterns tool, a tool she developed during the first six years of her teaching artist career to help…

Dance education provides a language that allows students and teachers to express themselves in new ways and to think through ideas differently. All students deserve the opportunity to learn things in new ways, to internalize information and rephrase it, to understand their world and contribute to it. All students deserve the opportunity to…

In this article, the author describes an innovative collaboration with an elementary school math teacher that leads to original student choreography and engaging mathematical thinking. Using a tool the author created called Jump Patterns, students at Fox Hill Elementary School in Indianapolis, Indiana, engage in a robust, creative, choreographic…

This case study is one of twenty cases derived from Anderson and Risner's international study of teaching artists in dance, and theatre, which investigated participants' (n=172) artistic and academic preparation in dance, and theatre, initial entry into the teaching artist field, rewards, challenges, and obstacles in participants' work, artists'…

Writing about the teaching artist practice should mean writing about art making. As both teacher and artist, the authors are required to be cognizant of their own art-making processes, both how it works and why it is important to them, in order to make this process visible to their students. They also need the same skills to write about how and…

Stories in the "ALT/Space" section of each issue of "Teaching Artist Journal" illustrate and document a wide variety of topics surrounding the work of teaching artists while simultaneously revealing some larger truths about what it means to be an artist who teaches. This particular section focuses on the process and realities…