International Journal of Education & the Arts

by Lisa Wilson

The slogan “I can’t breathe” reverberated in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement protests against police brutality and racial injustices in America. As much as there was an uncanny coincidence with that phrase and the root of the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate association of those words for me, a dance educator in South Africa, was the 2015 #RhodesMustFall national student protests in South Africa. Black students at the University of Cape Town, and eventually across the nation, vehemently protested racism and the suffocating whiteness of their institutions and curricula. Their motto of “We can’t breathe” resonated in our dance studios and lecture halls. Through personal narratives the author aims to reveal multiple ways in which racism can permeate dance teaching and learning and the adverse effects of this abhorrent phenomenon on dancers and dance education. A lacuna in the dance scholarship on race and racism are first-person accounts that provide rich descriptions of individual’s lived experiences with racism in dance. As a step toward healing and transformation, such storytelling is useful for demystifying a phenomenon that is complex and prone to blind spots and denial.

by Urša Rupnik & Vesna Geršak

This paper presents a pilot study of creative movement workshops that enriched the school life of fourth graders at a primary school in Slovenia during the closure of educational institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project involved a dancer who met with students via the Zoom platform for four months, preparing, leading, and facilitating dance activities based on current curriculum content. Using qualitative analysis, we present the views of students, parents, a teacher and a dancer on the integration of arts to online teaching and learning. The creative movement workshops exhibited the importance of including opportunities for movement within online curriculum for students, as they spent most of their time sitting in front of screens. The workshops created opportunities for social interaction where other forms of online instruction otherwise reduced social contact. Finally, the movement and dance activities contributed to a better understanding of some learning content.

by Lynnette Young Overby, Erika Gould Brown, Teresa Emmons, Kimberly Schroeder & Joan Warburton-Phibbs

Upon the convergence of the twin epidemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice in 2020, the Delaware Dance Education Organization (DDEO) responded by creating and presenting interactive professional development webinars that ranged from sharing how dance history is a microcosm of the world to the impact culture has on personal behaviors. Through the lens of public scholarship, the virtual programming format allowed DDEO to reach dance populations in Delaware and beyond. Groundswell, a series of four webinars presented a consideration of the impact racism has in the dance world. Solos@Home invited participants to create, share, and virtually perform dance works based on material presented in Groundswell. Solos@Home II continued in this modality highlighting the theme of environmental justice. The value of activism was a key enduring understanding for these projects. DDEO continues to support and advance dance education while listening and responding to the immediate needs of the community.

by Neila-Ann Ebanks

Q: “What time is it?”
A: “Skin, past flesh, goin’ on to bone.”

As descendants of stolen Black bodies in the ‘New World’, many dancing Jamaicans have become living anachronisms, unconsciously embodying retentions of life-renewing cultural movement practices past spirit and bone, into flesh and skin. Jamaican tertiary dance education has long been predicated on this baseline understanding of spirit, skin, flesh and bone as felt things. Although dance educators had grappled with ‘dis’embodied millennial audacity before COVID-19, we trusted that corporeal ancestral alchemy would remain, and thought we would always have safe touch in our pedagogy toolkits when words were not enough. This article discusses selected experiences of tertiary dance education at the Edna Manley College of the Visual Arts during the COVID-19 pandemic and questions the ability of ancestral somatic legacies to transcend this ‘no-touch’, physically distant pandemic moment. Additionally, it highlights key ways in which teaching dance virtually has provided rich embodiment experiences, crossing from screen to bone with technology and imagination, and provides recommendations for dance educators to re-create learning spaces for students which re-connect them with spirit, skin, flesh and bone.

by Miriam Giguere

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students everywhere are exhibiting gaps in their social-emotional development. Dance advocates propose the prioritization of dance classes as a way to facilitate social-emotional learning. This essay examines the logic behind these advocacy efforts, but also cautions readers that social-emotional learning, even in the arts, can be misused to promote racial injustice and inequity if not properly structured. In the social arena, the idea is examined that social learning may be co-opted to reinforce obedience in children, and that “appropriate” social behaviors in a dance class may actually be the normalization of white middle class actions. In the emotional realm, the presumption that dance teaches emotional expression, must be linked to the awareness that the expression of emotion is a culturally contextual concept. Finally, from a perspective of cognition, dance can improve critical problem-solving skills, but only if the engagement is truly student centered.