A model for dance education: Promoting personal voice and communal learning

This paper encourages a reconsideration of the hierarchy of skills, knowledge and learning in dance. In dance the debate has been that teaching is somewhat inferior to the acts of performing and choreographing. Conversely, anyone can teach and that knowing our art form as a performer and/or choreographer prepares us for the implementation of curriculum and the politics of the teaching contexts. In particular, there has been much dispute about who should teach and how and what should be taught to children. In 1948 Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) presented educators with a revolutionary idea of ‘modern educational dance’, later termed ‘creative dance’. With the publication of his book, Modern Educational Dance, he offered a dance form that aimed to foster and promote children’s unconscious dance-like movements, preserve their spontaneity and foster artistic expression. He also offered a way of teaching, a pedagogy that supports a child-centred context for learning.