Pedagogical Perspectives on Developing Creativity in Dance Students

Rebecca Weber, Sara Benhard Reed

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Abstract

This article presents a study on three somatic movement dance educators’ perspectives on developing creativity in dance students. A post-positivist, inductive qualitative study was undertaken to gather practitioners Katye Coe’s, Sara Reed’s, and Rebecca Weber’s phenomenological reflections on teaching somatically informed dance and how somatic practices may contribute to enhancing students’ creativity in dance. Data were collected through open-ended interviews, which then underwent thematic analysis to identify shared pedagogical perspectives on developing creativity in dance students. Key themes which emerged included metaphorical thinking, a breadth and multi-directionality of thought, a sensitized relationship to embodiment, and applied practice or “usefulness.” These findings are theoretically contextualized through establishing their relation to existing cognitive psychological literature from the field of creativity research. The themes’ reliability is also enhanced through similar connections to existing somatics research from dance studies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)119-128
Number of pages10
JournalJournal of Dance Education
Volume22
Issue number2
Early online date17 Dec 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Apr 2022

Bibliographical note

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in [Journal of Dance Education]. [Weber, R & Reed, SB 2022, 'Pedagogical Perspectives on Developing Creativity in Dance Students', Journal of Dance Education, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 119-128.]

It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Keywords

  • creativity
  • dance education
  • embodiment
  • pedagogy
  • somatic practices
  • somatics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Visual Arts and Performing Arts

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