Designing Embodied Education in Dance
Design Principles
The DEED network is identifying design principles that can embrace, prompt and guide embodied education in dance. The principles shared here are drawn from our collaborative research and the DEED Harvest Meeting in September 2024. The principles should be seen as flexible, living suggestions that can support the development of the practice, curricula, language, skills, writing and research of this educational approach. The principles will evolve over time through personal and participatory exploration. The suggested design principles that embrace, prompt and guide embodied education in dance are:
Establish and sustain a committed
embodied practice of your own
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Essential to designing and facilitating embodied education is having and sustaining a committed embodied practice of one's own. This is considered important because:
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it fosters first-hand, lived experience of what students go through when they engage in embodied education and how to respond purposefully to their needs and the possible challenges that may arise.
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it helps to deepen understanding of and respect for the different embodied practices and approaches that exist within/outside of dance education, including their lineage, values, key concepts and principles, use of body-mind and movement, and pedagogical methods.
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it helps to acknowledge and celebrate the unique bodily potential of people within the learning community, which should be understood as a dynamic and evolving potential related to biological/biographical/environmental factors.
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it helps to listen to and care for the (ageing) body-mind in the various educational activities in which one is involved (e.g. teaching, designing, creating, mentoring, leading, researching).
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it helps to build a sound understanding of what changes could be made to make curricula more embodied.
Find Allies
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To strengthen and design sustainable embodied education, we propose finding allies and building partnerships with (dance) artists, practitioners and researchers within or outside one's institution (nationally and/or internationally) who are interested in or involved in embodied practice and education. This enables:
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collective practice as knowledge building.
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sharing and reflecting on common experiences.
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critical dialogue about existing views of dance, dance praxis and dance education.
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building new (pedagogical) knowledge and perspectives.
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setting common ground (within an institution and between peers).
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finding support and encouragement from peers to develop and facilitate embodied education in an institutional dance context, especially when faced with challenges (such as those related to creating a paradigm shift or dealing with adverse effects that can arise in embodied education).
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emphasising the importance of professional development for faculty (including resourcing personal practice) to enhance the value, potential, design and facilitation of embodied education.
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the creation of a model of embodied education that is sufficiently robust to outlive the practices and contributions of individual practitioners/educators.
Be Sensitive and Responsive to Context
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Designing embodied education requires context sensitivity and responsivity through holistic awareness and action to increase pedagogical relevance, consistency, practicality and effectiveness. Establishing these conditions involves:
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acknowledging the circumstantial realities of our students (past, present and future) and their embodied selves.
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ensuring that the curriculum reflects diverse perspectives (historical, contemporary, ‘glocal’) to make it relevant and accessible to all students, regardless of their background.
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considering the institutional context including the facilities and affordances in which the education is embedded.
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designing and offering a variety of learning resources to create space for multi-sensory learning experiences that make learning engaging, accessible and appealing for all students.
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adopting a pedagogy of presence that invites staying attuned to the present moment in order to notice and respond to what is happening or what is available for an individual student or for the group.
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providing space for the use of different media formats for assignments and presentations so that students can make sense of their lived learning experiences and express the knowledge gained from these experiences in a way that suits them best.
Establish an educational culture that is learning oriented
Embodied education values learning as a process of improving rather than proving, of finding personal solutions rather than fixing, of unlearning and relearning. To establish such a learning-oriented educational culture, it is helpful to:
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spend time together in a shared exchange through embodied doing-thinking.
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guide teaching towards the work itself, not just assessment.
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include time and space to slow down, reflect, contemplate, listen to the unspoken, the hidden or what lies beneath the words.
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cultivate supportive learning attitudes such as: play, being, responsibility, gentleness, trust, patience, setting aside expectations.
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pay attention to informal learning.
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create learning communities with non-hierarchical relationships between students and teachers, while supporting teachers to be effective in guiding the students’ learning journey.
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establish regular opportunities for open dialogue and feedback between students and educators, fostering a culture of continuous feedback and improvement.
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implement and use assessment methods that capture moments of work lightly and naturally and focus on the learning process and progress rather than judgement/measurement of final outcomes.
Invest in foregrounding the value and potential of embodied education and knowledge
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Embodied education, and the knowledge it generates through embodied inquiry, is a gateway to developing awareness of self, other, environment, connectedness, sustainability, other ways of knowing and ownership of learning. It can therefore feed into many artistic educational activities and contexts. To design embodied education, it is therefore important to foreground its potential by:
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recognising the value of embodiment as central to education, despite ongoing changes and challenges in education.
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showing, sharing, expressing or dancing how embodied knowledge is equally valuable to other formats and media used for communication and knowledge production.
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incorporating embodied practice and/or its principles into all educational practice and policy, to normalise embodied learning as knowledge production.
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advocating and developing extended modules on embodied practice beyond the dance discipline.
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creating participatory and transdisciplinary research or knowledge building opportunities on the topic.
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increasing understanding of how embodied education and knowledge can be academically rigorous.
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encourage all students and faculty to befriend and embrace the living body as a valid source of knowledge.