Children's Dance-Making: An Autoethnographic Path Towards Transformative Critical Pedagogy
My dissertation, a self-reflective autoethnography, examines, analyzes, andinterprets children’s dances created by seventeen nine- 11 year olds attending aMidwestern, urban elementary school. The significance of this longitudinal study is in the offering of a fresh perspective on children’s dance-making as a mode of embodied understanding and as a process for personal transformation in life. As a reflective practitioner, I observe and write data reflexively using dance narratives. I describe instances where child dance-makers construct personally relevant meanings that embody personal transformations not dependent solely on outside events or codified dance portraitures.Children negotiate inner experience with multifaceted sensory-play, feelings,ideas, themes, images, and structures through personally relevant dances that are created and interpreted within particular learning communities. This transformative act is at the center of why and how each dance made is an embodied act of knowledge-making and a result of preparation that is cultivated and defended privately by each person. It calls for pedagogical change in elementary school dance education practice to insure that spaces for this multimodal educational endeavor are embedded into educational policy, curriculum, and instructional practice.
Dance, Curriculum Development, Art Education, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Education, Education Philosophy, Educational Sociology, Elementary Education, Pedagogy, Performing Arts, Children's dance-making, autoethnography, cognition, feministic methodology, socio-cultural inquiry, critical pedagogy
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