Research on creative dance education has indicated that students can take risks and improvise when the teacher relinquishes control through an open and explorative approach. I add to the discussion by exploring the unexpected and spontaneous episodes when teaching dance improvisation in settings outside dance education. Based on empirical material…

Purpose: The study focuses on identifying and changing gender stereotype beliefs associated with sport and physical activity in primary education students. It also examines the influence and usefulness of an applied pedagogical intervention. Method: The study contains a descriptive cross-sectional stage, followed by an intermediate stage…

Practitioner Exchanges (PXs) at Luna Dance Institute are casual community conversations co-facilitated by dance educators around a topic of dance teaching inquiry. With the physical disconnection of the COVID era, these in-person roundtables shifted to Zoom, and became even more essential in bringing teaching artists together. Educators from all…

Contemporary dance and meditative practices are increasingly intertwining in both academic and professional settings as the wide range of current mind/body modalities infiltrate the already vast landscape of modern dance. While the value of emphasizing mindful movement in dance cannot be understated, focusing solely on the slower, sensorial…

In the past a typical performance situation consisted of a proscenium stage, performers on the stage and audience seated somewhere in the front. In today's technological age, audiences are prone to watching performance on their smart devices. This live-disconnect between the audience and performer/performance has affected the industry on multiple…

This practice-based article illustrates how dance education pedagogies can help refugee youth adjust to new settings. To support refugee youth in narrating aspects of belonging in their everyday lives, this article offers pedagogies for creative movement that unfold through multiple stages. As developed in the first author's dissertation study and…

I argue that personal style in improvisational dance is, amongst other factors, a matter of the dancers' attunement to sets of affordances. We can use the language and theory of affordances and enactive embodied cognition as a teaching tool to improve our students' improvisational practice. Often when a student's improvisational skill has…

Somatic memoirs from the author's participation at dance intensives with acclaimed dancer-choreographer Moustapha Bangoura in the West African Republic of Guinea reveal how solo dance experiences can test acoustic literacy, promote music interaction, and foster an aptitude for movement invention. These skills are fundamental to West African dance…

Acknowledging criticisms of the values supported by competitive dance, this article seeks to develop and advocate a pedagogical reframing of the event in terms of situated learning and mediated learning experience. Making sense of the competitive experience with the contributions of 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition theory,…

Physical education (PE), and specifically the teaching area of dance, has been identified as an important pedagogical setting within which young people develop creativity. Creativity is thus an important aspect of schooling. Several studies have suggested however, that dance is seldom taught in PE in ways that acknowledge creative aspects of…

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 reflects on the pedagogical practices I explored, reimagined, and employed while shifting dance improvisation education from face-to-face lessons in a dance studio setting to existing online platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Through self-study research as a method of inquiry I analyse my experiences…

The present study uses a qualitative approach to focus on dance improvisation and flow. Dance instructors with wide experience in performing and teaching dance improvisation took part in semi-structured interviews that featured questions about dance improvisation and flow, including issues of flow in dance education with children. The data were…

This study examines the pedagogical strategies of a dance instructor working with older adults in a virtual asynchronous community dance class, and the ways in which dance instruction influences older adults' physical literacy. Physical literacy is a multidimensional framework which helps us understand meaningful and motivating physical activity…

This paper describes the pedagogical roots of the work we do, both as teachers and as performers; and how our work reaches beyond the classroom and into community, eliciting narratives and weaving them through improvised dance and music collaborations, eventually onto the walls of an art museum. Our concept was to solicit stories that told of some…