In working with children with special educational needs both in South Africa and in Denmark, I continue to reflect upon who should dance and how to train dancers who are differently abled. The label of “other” dancer profoundly challenges the notion of “ideal dancing bodies” as “cultures collide.” This paper sets out to engage with the notions of “disability arts” by suggesting some working definitions for this loaded term and provides an examination within the South African context of the multiculturalism of the disabled community, which could be seen as a cultural grouping in and of itself.

This paper problematises the training of dance teachers in post-apartheid South Africa. The provisioning of the state primary and secondary schools that offer dance studies as part of the Learning Area, Arts and Culture, with effective teachers is crucial to the delivery of satisfactory dance education in South Africa, where the Revised National Curriculum Statement is specifically intended to meet the diverse demands of the post-apartheid arts environment. The paper proposes that the training of dance educators is further complicated due to the tensions created by the gaps between post-apartheid education philosophy and the realities of teaching, particularly in state schools in the Western Cape.

This paper considers how Taiwanese kindergarten teachers' skills and abilities in teaching creative dance are being developed through a government-funded project in which researchers are collaborating with volunteer kindergartens to research, develop, and assess strategies for teacher training and development. In doing so, they are addressing the significant gap between government policy, teacher skills and knowledge, and classroom practice. The paper reflects on specific cases and the success with which teachers have been empowered and motivated by their direct involvement in the development of strategies, and their dance teaching abilities developed by fully involving them in the research process.

This article makes the case for a less-traveled move across the choreographer-scholar divide—the theorizing choreographer over against the scholar as “performing theorist.” Performative writing exercises exemplify an embodied writing practice in which choreographic process is conjoined with critical theory to write back into one's dance as a reflective and reflexive practice. How might choreographic process infiltrate academic writing methods with its inscriptive bones, interpretive muscle, and theoretical backbone? The premise is that bodily action and choreographic knowledge enlivens the writing process and critical inquiry revitalizes the dance.

Collaborative practice in the choreographic context gives rise to behaviours that students create, modify, and abandon as they react to different situations. These behaviours are determined by a set of responses, some of which arise to cope with those of other people. The workshop presents and deconstructs a range of situations and responses, allowing participants to explore the impact of these on the collaborative process and individual learning. This is with the view of moving toward a radical proposal for assessment within the choreographic context, which prioritizes individual learning and experience over process.

Western history is organised into more or less distinct “periods” that give shape to our conception of the past. I offer an alternative way of conceptualising dance history that retains the long view but disturbs conventional periodisation. This is based on Penelope Corfield's premise that time can be organised not only by distinguishing radical disjunctures but also by “continuity” and “micro” change. If these concepts are applied to dance, many of the difficulties of time frame, hierarchy, and value might be eroded. Furthermore, they expand the opportunities for pedagogy and research to address works or people who have been elided by traditional periodisation.

A primary issue for dance education and training is ensuring that the “trained body” is equipped for the range of activity today's dance practitioner will encounter. Modern dance techniques offer a breadth of knowledge on numerous and inter-related levels, encompassing the physical, physiological, artistic, historical, musical, and analytical. This paper will consider the relevance and benefits that “traditional” modern dance training can have on today's dancer. Issues addressed will include what our students are using technique for; what a codified dance technique can offer; and the progression to a “trained body” and how this can be achieved.

This paper seeks to help bridge the gap between the study of ballet technique and modern dance for today's university dance major. With the growing importance of strong ballet training in contemporary dance choreography, dance majors are often presented with a duality of training—modern vs. ballet—that can be difficult for them to marry, both in their minds and bodies. Traditional methods and concepts of ballet training are explored in this context with the goal of presenting a means of teaching ballet that allows for a full integration of ballet with other contemporary dance techniques.

Many universities are now applying somatic practices to dance technique classes. Yet there is little research addressing the pedagogy of somatic theory and practice within a curricular context. Additionally, somatic theory is often taught in separate lecture courses, and there is not much discussion about how to weave somatic theory and practice through interdisciplinary or intradisciplinary approaches. This lecture-demonstration addresses pedagogical strategies for joining somatic theory and practice. We demonstrate strategies and examples of working through various somatic and anatomical concepts and discuss curricular and research possibilities, as well as issues and problems raised during this project.

This lecture demonstration outlines a pedagogy for teaching contact improvisation. Designed for educational settings (universities/schools), it teaches improvisation for performance and self-developed practice. The pedagogy eschews “structured” and “task-based” improvisation for “open scores” and “perceptual/spatial” harmonics. The basic curricula can be taught in a single semester module (twelve weeks, three hours per week) and is suitable for dance and “nondance” students without compromising “quality” or “depth” of engagement. This session covers the four areas of study students learn: philosophy and principles, practical skill sets, applied contextual and critical theory, and performance.

This paper explores the histories, practices, and legacies of ballet studies in academic education in the United Kingdom. Charting the coexistence of vocational training in mainstream professional colleges and the emergence of ballet studies in select higher education institutions provides a reading into the marginalisation of ballet studies within the spectrum of dance degrees in the twenty-first century. The paper presents selected readings of sociocultural, artistic, and pedagogical trends concerned with the proliferation of dance and ballet degrees (1980S–1990S); and the effect of issues in training and academic studies on the nature of past and current programmes in the field of ballet studies.

This paper explores the intricacies of ballet pedagogy delivered at U.K. higher education (HE) institutions; the enquiry identifies and explores the tensions between vocational training to a professional level and achieving the educational requirements of HE. This paper queries the potential incompatibility of education and traditional training, suggesting that for dancers to meet the requirements of today's dance industry, students need skills to “deal with reality” rather than “getting it right.” A social interactionist perspective positions the role of the teacher as a facilitator; ballet pedagogy is constructed upon a holistic perspective unifying the mind and body, enabling students to participate rather than be directed in their learning.

This paper considers the extent to which assessment of ballet technique within higher education can be congruent with the expectations of professional practice while at the same time acknowledging self-actualisation and regulation through experiences of assessment. Assuming that the study of any discipline within higher education should prepare individuals for employment within a professional stream, this paper questions how expectations of ballet technique within higher education align with expectations of the dance profession. Further, the paper examines how objective measures that underline accountability and transparency in assessment practices align with aesthetic variables such as interpretation, presentation, and artistic sensibility.

This paper reports on three years of research conducted through the Centre for Excellence in Performance Arts at De Montfort University. The intention of the paper is to align the assessment of dance practice with pedagogic concerns. The development of an innovative approach to assessment and feedback is discussed with respect of the nature of dance practice, constructive alignment, and validity and reliability. Whilst this research derives from practice-based research, it is also informed by published material on pedagogy and hermeneutics.

Drawing on the Dance Partners for Creativity Research Project, this paper will consider the research methodologies and methods employed by a team of dance education professionals who seek to contribute to reinvigorating practice in relation to young people's creativity in secondary-level dance education in England. They have developed a focus on investigating the kinds of creative partnerships that are manifested between dance-artists and dance-teachers in a range of school settings. Using critical pedagogical and socio-constructivist approaches, the research draws on ethnographic, participatory, and reflective methods. The focus is on how partnerships can function as research sites, with participants as co-researchers.

This paper provides an overview of a project led by Sarah Whatley and David Bennett at Coventry University as part of the JISC-funded project CURVE (Coventry University Repository for a Virtual Environment). The project was one of a number of work packages developed throughout 2007–2008, in this case a dance learning objects package, to assist student engagement with the university's virtual learning environment (VLE). The dance learning objects package was developed, trialled, and is now in place. In developing these materials, the interest was in how the digital dance objects that we were creating for a parallel project—the AHRC funded Siobhan Davies Archive, which is an online digital archive—could be developed into learning objects and how this might lead to the development of new ways of teaching and learning, new assessment methods, and the development of further dance learning objects.

Guiding dancers toward embodied experience, full engagement with their own physicality, awareness, and intention have been constant aims of my teaching over the course of forty years. Do students in the university program where I now teach “get it”? With a current technique class, I have investigated—through journaling and discussion—students' expectations around the “power structure” of dance class, how they perceive their sense of responsibility to their own training, and whether and how they evolve in making passionate choices and engaging deeply with dancing (albeit somewhat subversively) within the academic setting.

The historically autocratic teaching model of Western concert dance provides both student and teacher with the comfort of expected ritual and outcomes. That comfort is greatly disrupted, however, in employing a pedagogy that has student empowerment at its center—feminist pedagogy. This paper will focus on the conditions of the liminal space created in shifting to a process-based educational approach from a traditionally product-driven training model.