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…

This paper describes a dance-based research project conducted at the Department of Early Childhood Education of the University of Thessaly. The main aim of the project was to explore the possibilities of dance in understanding the self in relation to the world, under the perspective of the transformative learning theory. The methodology applied…

This qualitative study investigated the impact of the mirror on a dancer's body image. Two groups of students enrolled in beginner ballet classes were taught the same classroom material; one group was taught with mirrors, the other, without. At the end of the semester four students from each class were randomly selected to participate in a private…

In August 2010, dance artist Jess Allen undertook an eight-day journey on foot and public transport between the 10 wind farms of mid-Wales, talking to the people encountered about changing landscapes and changing values in a changing climate. The sound recordings of interviews and encounters conducted in this process were edited into a score that…

This research explores issues involving gender, education, and learning/using English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) by investigating three Japanese women's experiences of fashioning their lives in ways that made them feel satisfied and happy. In order to develop an "emic" point of view--one derived from grounding myself as…

For dance educators engaged in teaching choreography in Christian tertiary institutes, encouraging students to develop foundational compositional skills whilst exploring personal expression of the Christian faith is undoubtedly a challenging objective. In 2005, a Christian tertiary education provider in South Australia enrolled six female dance…

This paper reports on "Web3D dance composer" for ballet e-learning. Elementary "petit allegro" ballet steps were enumerated in collaboration with ballet teachers, digitally acquired through 3D motion capture systems, and categorised into families and sub-families. Digital data was manipulated into virtual reality modelling language (VRML) and fit…

The aim of this study was to examine how dance teachers work with psychological skills with their students in class. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six female professional teachers in jazz, ballet and contemporary dance. The interview transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith 1996). Results…

Community workers are often described as unsung heroes who work for, with and alongside others in order to make qualitative differences to the communities they serve. This paper reports on the story of a community-based arts educator, Morgan Jai-Morincome, winner of the ACT Adult Learners Week Award for an outstanding program in 2007. This…

Participation in physical activities, in and out of school, remains heavily influenced by social constructions of gendered behaviour. In addition, the body plays a significant part in the presentation of legitimate performances of physical practice and the construction of a physical "identity". The consequence is that in formalized…

This article highlights the perspectives of young women who have participated in dance for many years. Their viewpoints reveal the unique multimodal nature of embodied learning; in dance classes, teachers and learners communicate through a variety of modes: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, spatial, musical, tactile, gestural, and linguistic. The…

The purpose of this study was to discuss the dance technique class experiences of students in a university dance program. Working within a post-positivist methodological framework, I interviewed five university dancers. Using the lenses of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I compared and contrasted the women's stories with each other's and my own.…