Pedagogy to Practice (Asynchronous)
Community Integration Practice Curriculum in Undergraduate Dance Degrees: Preparing Today's Dance Artist View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cheyla Clawson
While an emerging body of published research explores examples of community initiatives being achieved through dance, few studies have explored the extent to which community integration practices are being infused into the BFA curriculum. For the purpose of this study, community integration practice course content may include entrepreneurship and creative venture, business for the arts, writing and research skills including grants and public scholarship, community engagement including prevention and social programming, and professional internships. Unobtrusive methods were utilized to investigate the role community engaged curriculum plays in a four-year dance performance degree. What courses currently exist that enable students to graduate with a four-year dance performance degree while enhancing their ability to become independent, sustainable artists? Are these courses required or electives? What role does curriculum infusion play in introducing students to market-driven transferable skills? Program related research of this type is a vital precursor for understanding gaps in preparation dance performance degree students have when entering the professional realm of dance. This is particularly relevant within the current economic climate as the number of awarded dance degrees increases but the number of full-time and part-time jobs decrease. Today’s dance performer will increasingly need to employ a variety of entrepreneurial skills to create their own career paths. Empowering future graduates with additional community skills will impact the field of dance in ways we may not yet imagine. Educating performers to integrate their work into communities can not only increase potential employment opportunities but also build social capital.
Edged: Exploring the Porous Boundaries between Teaching Philosophy, Dance Performance, and Choreographic Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Louis Laberge-Côté
Over the past four years I have developed The Porous Body, a teaching philosophy that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability in dance training by following four fundamental guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor, and paradox. As my process deepened, I wondered: what would happen if I applied The Porous Body to my choreographic practice? How might this framework prove fruitful during a creative process? What kind of choreographic work would emerge from this experiment? This paper is an artist’s reflection on an artistic experiment; it describes the first choreographic process to which I applied The Porous Body’s guiding principles, and which led to the creation and performance of edged, a solo work exploring the porous edges between inner/outer, planned/unplanned, control/surrender, pleasure/struggle, and terror/courage.
Native Arts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nancy Marie Mithlo
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and emerging BIPOC demands for equity, American museums and arts organizations newly sought out Native American artists and curators as commentators and lecturers. The pervasive desire for difference in the Covid-19 era of ubiquitous Zoom conversations resulted in live, unscripted, and recorded interactions that provide useful data for researchers interested in the ways structural racism is enacted in public discourse. In particular, the question and answer component of recorded discussions expose how audience members exercise willful ignorance, power and control, while appearing as innocuous and eager learners. Casual racism, (as expressed in the audience's right to know, regardless of the content of the inquiry) emerged in institutional settings characterized as educational and inclusive. These demands for knowing include inquiries unrelated to the arts such as audience members’ questionable claims to Native ancestry. Simplistic inquiries taken seriously by institutional hosts have the effect of diminishing the intellectual worth of artists and curators who are thrust into the role of primary school teachers. In addition, audience retaliation and anger during these exchanges present real safety concerns for Native women speakers who are already statistically prone to becoming victims of violence. The author examines taped Zoom examples of museums and arts institutions engaged in Native arts discourses post-Covid in an effort to locate trends and expose patterns of abuse. Techniques for strategic interventions are identified including speaker contracts, institutional protocols, and key terms for identifying and exposing abuses of power masked as educational exercises.
Decolonizing the Classroom: A Framework for Ethical Jazz Dance Pedagogy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jeremy Blair, Lindsay Viatori
This paper examines contemporary pedagogical praxis within jazz dance to identify strategies which centralize and prioritize the Africanist presence. The European influence within jazz dance has been the privileged perspective and historically the lens through which the form is predominantly viewed, documented, critiqued, and taught. Educators with privilege are obligated to develop anti-racist pedagogy to lessen the burden on oppressed people. By recognizing the politics of race and power in dance, educators can begin to identify unconscious bias and ingrained modes of dissemination. This research invites educators to do and undo: to make visible the elements of Africanist ways of doing and to challenge exclusively European approaches. Specifically, educators can address cultural cross-pollination in jazz dance styles in America, identify the Africanist aesthetic, and begin to write history through embodied practice, giving students a more accurate picture of jazz dance. We posit that an experiential learning model with assessment tools prioritizing process over product, gathering information on student subjective experience, as well as explicit citation by the instructor of social-vernacular dance forms begin to decolonize twenty-first century jazz dance pedagogy.
Post Post: Knowing Unknowing View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deb Scott, Margaret Chambers
With this paper, we expose dialectic relationships with time as context and influence on higher education and movements that shape artists as makers, pedagogues, and theorists. Proliferating from our cross-generational encounters with academies rooted in Post-Modernist and Post-Internet viewpoints, we find convergent and entangled ethics of uncertainty and agency found in the space of contemporary pedagogy. For the purposes of this paper, we focus on post-modern and post-internet preoccupations with truth. What common ethos is required when information acquisition and assimilation changes so dynamically over time? In our increased sensitivity to the influx of rapid-fire information-sharing that now inundates students’ social, creative, and intellectual pursuits, how does theory-- specifically post-modernist assertions of “no truth” and post-internet perspectives of truth as endless possibility-- transform into tangible, edifying, confident studio experiences? Inspired agency requires a responsive, contextually constructed, and relationally centered curricula that is shared and shaped as it grapples with the objective and subjective nature of “truth”. Creative agency from all actants spark “new” movements contesting prior pedagogical approaches where reliance on the presuming aesthete to define veritable matter for study is challenged. The growing democratization of art turns artists into conversationalists, facilitators, and editors. The new politics of pedagogy plays through tensions between historical roles and contemporary expectations where artists are expected to draw upon multiple and often abstract sources for creative study. In this year of isolated experiences, we reflect on artistic lineage. Out of this comes a negotiation exploring how we come to know and teach things.
See Through the Invisibility, Hear from the Silence: A Photovoice Project on Sexuality Education for Children in Rural China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tong Xin, Dan Chen
This photovoice project is aimed at responding to a challenge: the invisibility and silence of existing sex and gender issues. It was an engaged project working with 12 children aged 9 to 12 in southeast China village. It seeks to understand 1) how children learn about sex and gender in everyday life and 2) how children experienced a provided sexuality education curriculum. The introduction of photo-taking opened up the possibility for participating children to make their observations and experiences visible. Centering the pictures produced and selected by children, in-depth interviews and group discussions generated personal narrative, collective reflection, and turned sex and gender topics discussable. With the recognition that sex and gender issues intersect with various factors in an individual life, researchers worked with each child in negotiating what they want to and feel comfortable expressing. This negotiation turned out to be a process of children showing their knowledge in sex and gender through euphemism, emotional expression, code-switching, and secret-sharing. These strategies are an extension of “knowing”: knowing what should remain invisible and silent without being limited by this knowing. The researcher team curated two exhibitions with different approaches: the community exhibition in the local reading room situates the unfamiliar discussion of sex and gender in the familiar presentation of community life; and the art gallery exhibition features each child’s life as mini ethnography, showing the contexts within which their knowledge and silence grew.
Derby Voice: Creative Place-making View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rhiannon Jones, Daithi Mc Mahon
The artistic research project Derby Voice engaged 300 young people from areas of deprivation in Derby and at risk of exclusion from education. The methodology used S.H.E.D to create a co-designed site-specific installation at Derby Cathedral. It provided young people with opportunities to create work for a public context, to talk about their city and issues exacerbated by the COVID pandemic in the UK; such as BLM, education reform, employment, mental health and well-being. The research identified key barriers including the lack of cultural integration outside of school time in the UK and the impact on financial or family support. Derby Voice highlights the value of devising an artistic and dialogic methodology. The research’s impact is noted within UK contemporary social contexts. It enhanced wellbeing, widened access and increased cultural opportunities for young people in Derby. It shifted thinking about formal education settings and redefined the way young people’s voices are understood and can influence policy and act as a call for change. The research highlights the benefits of temporal installations as cultural and consultation spaces for stakeholders, public and policy-makers to engage directly with youth voice, through creative place-making by young people. It provided essential life skills resulting in social mobility and widening access to the arts. It disseminated both the design and impact of the research, proposing that dialogic methodologies are an instigator for change in order to enable and empower young people. The research actively contributed to the cultural offer in Derby and impacts of socially-engaged art.
