This ethnographic case story aims to illuminate the instructional practices and decisions of an exemplary ballet teacher, Minna Stenvall at the Finnish National Opera Ballet School. Minna is considered to be exemplary in her field because she received the Best Ballet Pedagogue Award in 2014. Spurred on by the literature on the significant role…

This article is the result of an interview with Judith Nelson conducted by Madeline Cantor. Madeline is the Associate Director of the Dance Program at Bryn Mawr College and a colleague and friend of Judith Nelson. In this article, Judith offers her perspective as a dance educator who teaches students with disabilities, and as a parent of a child…

This paper explores dance as literacy. Specifically, it examines qualitative case study research findings and student examples from a dance artist-in-residence that explored curricular content using dance as its primary mode of enquiry and expression. Throughout the residency, students constructed meaning through their dance experiences in dynamic…

Examining practice, within education, is complex and never straightforward. It is not a surprise that when we conduct research, we discover new and contrary meanings. For the last 16 months we have been examining different means for supporting teaching and learning of the arts in primary schools. Our aim was to better understand how to teach the…

This article presents the findings from a focus group discussion conducted with first year undergraduate dance students in March 2015. The focus group concluded a cycle of action research during which the researcher explored the use of enquiry-based learning approaches to teaching dance technique in higher education. Grounded in transformative and…

This article explores attitudes about feedback and critical thinking in dance technique classes. The authors discuss an expansion of their teaching practices to include feedback as bidirectional (transactional) and a part of developing critical thinking skills in student dancers. The article was written after the authors undertook research…

In this article, I draw critical attention to the assistive mobility devices that individuals who are differently bodied often use in dance and suggest that the dance genre presents the opportunity for reimagining the technological possibilities of these devices and creating more diverse repertoires. As an intervention and example, I describe the…

A local trend in commercial dance studio education is the implementation of real-time digital video surveillance. This case study explores how digital video cameras in the dance studio environment affect asymmetrical power relationships already present in the commercial studio setting, as well as how surveillance impacts feminist pedagogical…

This study reevaluates modern dance training in Korea and attempts to identify possible improvements. This study is based on the rationale that Korean modern dance training must recover its nature of a holistic connection between body and mind. A qualitative methodology was used to interpret data from in-depth interviews and open-ended…

This article deals with didactics, dance and teacher knowing in an upper secondary school context in Sweden. Dance is referred to as a western theatrical art form as well as to a subject mainly defined through its curriculum. A qualitative interview study with experienced dance teachers constitutes the base on which two overarching theoretical…

The purpose of this study was to capture the student's views in lessons of creative dance. A qualitative empirical research design was carried out using video-stimulated recall interviews. The participants in this study were 88 children (63 female and 25 male) between the ages of 9 and 11 years (M = 10.5, SD = 1.2) in physical education lessons. A…

The act of teaching is constituted by tensions between contradictory influences of national educational systems, teachers' professional/personal identity, cultural and social values. Qualitative research methods can explore this complex situation. Indeed, narrative methods have explored teachers' "life histories". This article provides a…

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…

Is there a need for dance to enter higher education in Greece? Can contemporary dance be viewed as a discipline on its own right? These questions inspired the research conducted in three case study institutions (out of six that exist) in Greece, examining the reality within them as experienced by dance students, lecturers, course leaders and the…

The author identifies higher order thinking as an essential component of dance training for students of all ages and abilities. Weaving together insights from interviews with experts in the field of dance education with practical pedagogical applications within an Improvisation and Composition class for talented and gifted youth, this article…