Difference, Creativity and Collaboration: Challenges for Teachers of Quality-Oriented Education Dance in China

In the last three decades, the Quality-Oriented Education reforms in China have sought to foster creativity and collaboration as graduate attributes in tertiary education. This has led to the introduction of Quality-Oriented Education Dance (QOED) in 2012. As a new curriculum and teacher-training method, QOED presents an alternative to the deeply entrenched authoritarian pedagogical model experienced by tens of thousands of tertiary dance students in China each year. The transition of teachers into this new teaching method has been complex however, particularly within an educational landscape that prioritises hierarchies, competition, and conformity. This thesis therefore explores the question: How do the former educational purposes of QOED teachers challenge their current approaches to teaching creativity and collaboration? This foregrounds the importance of an educational purpose, as a rationalising mandate for teachers that is distinct from what they are teaching and how they are teaching it. If our education is to be emancipatory, then our teaching practices need to be guided by a pragmatic sense of why we are teaching. To explore this sense of educational purpose, this thesis engages a qualitative method and constructivist theoretical framework, using semi-structured interviews to elicit the teaching narratives and reflections of eight experienced teachers of QOED. Their experiences and perspectives reveal how traces of their former authoritarian educational practices sustain hierarchies, competition and conformity, thereby diminishing the value of diversity and challenging the emergence of collaboration within their classrooms. These findings emphasise the educational importance of a metacognition of creativity and collaboration, which involves an understanding how difference and diversity underpin collectivised innovation. This metacognition may allow teachers to have a more coherent educational purpose in QOED, and identify when and how the legacy of former educational purposes may inhibit collaboration in the classroom. This research therefore offers valuable insights into current QOED teaching mindsets, which can inform the evolution of dance educator training in QOED.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Dance Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Jiahui

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Rowe, Nicholas
• Buck, Ralph

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/67319

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/67319