Introduction
The process by which people acquire, enhance, and change their abilities, knowledge, and worldviews is known as learning. Equally, this is motivated by a desire to assist people in cognitive, environmental, and emotional development. Dance education instills in students a broad understanding of dance as an art form or provides professional instruction in specific dance disciplines.
Dance is currently considered an allied form of art and music and is consequently linked with these subjects in formal education. Dance education also involves a research component, in which academics conduct groundbreaking studies on innovative ways to teach and learn the art form. This essay will examine pedagogical theories, dance education, transmission and activism, multiculturalism in dance education, and the role of gender in strengthening dance education.
Pedagogy Theories and Their Applicability
Learning can be defined as the process by which people acquire, improve, and modify their abilities, knowledge, and worldviews. This is primarily motivated by the desire to help people develop cognitively, environmentally, and emotionally. Learning has been achieved through the application of various learning theories and models over the years. Learning theory, for example, might be described as the processes by which scholars grasp, assimilate, implement, and preserve info received during the education process. As students’ learning needs become increasingly diverse, these learning philosophies continue to evolve, and new ones emerge (Zhu, 2018).
Constructivist Theory
Constructivist theory is applied in education, through which learners construct knowledge rather than passively take in information. More importantly, it is vital to acquire knowledge and skills that can be applied in the future when students attend school. In dance education and practices within higher learning institutions, students need to acquire knowledge that they can apply as artists. In the art industry, when artists compose songs, they must know how to dance and how well the dance moves can be applied to the composed songs. Constructivist theory consistently helps dance class students reflect on what is happening in the art industry and refine their approach for the future.
Collaborative Theory
Collaborative learning theory is vital when learning new skills from other experienced students in the institutions. In the collaborative approach, learners rely on one another as they share and dispense knowledge. Similarly, with this type of collaborative learning, students often retain information from their peers rather than from the teacher. Equally, while participating in the dance class session, students will develop deeper thinking skills. Hence, with collaborative theory, students will develop a higher level of thinking and the know-how to interact with people, especially artists, to collaborate and make moves in the dance industry.
Cognitive Theory
Cognitive theory applies information processing concepts to enhance students’ understanding of dance education. In the art industry, artists must know how to craft words effectively to produce music with a clear message. Equally, through cognitive theory, students in dance class are taught well by focusing on the three stages of information processing. The stages include sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory (Daniel Albert, 2019). Conversely, regarding gender in dance education, females are less likely to grasp information faster than males gender. Fortunately, cognitive theory, which underlies information processing, ensures that both female and male genders are equally represented and preserves data for a long time.
These learning theories mentioned above have been combined with various instructional and pedagogical prototypes and methodologies. The instructional models help teachers and students choose the best educational approaches and plans, as well as effective ways to assess teaching outcomes or performance. ADDIE, Carey Assure, Regressive Design (Understanding by Design), and Kemp Design Model are the most often used instructional models. The instructor’s instructional model is determined by the learner’s history, environment, learning goals, and skills.
Learning pedagogy is created by combining instructional approaches and learning theories (Zhu, 2018). Pedagogy is primarily concerned with determining how knowledge and skills are transmitted and shared in a learning environment. Most educational ideas and practices regard the student as an “agent” and the teacher as a “facilitator.”
Typically, the instructor’s pedagogical style influences how they teach, their teaching tactics, their decision-making processes, and their actions. Understanding the learners’ requirements, backgrounds, and particular interests requires a combination of numerous learning theories and pedagogical practices. Dialogic learning (teaching through dialogue and arguments), student-centered learning (teaching through instruction moved to learners), and critical pedagogy are some of the most often used pedagogical approaches (education practices being shaped by history) (Zhu, 2018). The three points above aim to liberalize education and encourage human growth in dance and training in higher learning institutions.
Dance Education, Transmission, and Activism
Dance Education
Dance education provides pupils with a comprehensive understanding of dance as an art form or professional training in specific dance genres. Students in dance education classes aim to refine their dance skills; therefore, they require instruction from experienced professionals who have a background in the industry (Mills, 2021). Reasonably, dance encompasses many aspects, such as the dance moves that align with the beats of the song. Through dance education, students can improve their talent and learn what is required for success.
Dance education also encompasses a research sector, where academics conduct innovative research on new approaches to teaching and learning dance. Learning about dance continues to improve daily; therefore, students should not be left behind, as dance information should be disseminated. Laws are in place to guide students in dance education, ensuring they do not breach copyright acts. Dance is now regarded as an allied form of art and music; therefore, it is intertwined with these disciplines in formal education. In general, dance education imparts good performing skills and knowledge of dance, ensuring that students have a diverse understanding of the art form.
Transmission
Transmission is part of heritage, which conveys the idea of protecting and preserving while simultaneously transferring valuable information that students should utilize. For students in dance class to understand, the past heritage must be shared with the current state. Concerning gender in dance education, transmission occurs in person and through watching videos on the media.
Transmission in dance education helps the students always understand and never run away from tradition and culture. Students can transfer different dance and movement skills from one body to another. Likewise, media-based transmission promotes gender balance during dance activities while observing videos (Lacono, 2022). The transmission of dance styles, as observed through the media, can occur subconsciously, and students will want to strive to perfect their techniques.
Activism
Activism focuses on questioning certain aspects of the dance education sector. Activism has long made dancers well-known. For instance, the well-known dance activist Pearl Primus was a dance researcher who, for an extended period, helped build the dance industry by ensuring a well-structured approach to dancing (Mills, 2021). When dancers dance without being criticized, there is a likelihood that they will never learn from their mistakes, and this will continue to build on, thus destroying their careers. Activism helps bring about positive change in the dance sector, leading to improved outcomes that impart valuable knowledge to young people in society.
Effects and Roles of Multiculturalism in Dance Education
Effects of Multiculturalism in Dance Education
Multiculturalism is defined as (a) the state of a society or the globe in which various ethnic and cultural groups are viewed as politically significant and (b) a program or policy that promotes such a society. Reasonably, the various ethnic and cultural groups contribute to the growth of dance education from a broad perspective (Reynolds, 2019). People, especially students, will learn about other cultures and their associated dances, and the dance moves will then be integrated into the dance class. Similarly, students in a dance class will learn more and gain more knowledge.
Productivity and Performance of Diverse Teams
The range of diverse teams from different backgrounds produces greater productivity, enabling the dancing class to perform better. Reasonably, distinct groups will share their perception of how certain moves can be made in a dancing class. Sensibly, this will increase the productivity rate of the students in dance education.
Dance encompasses various movements; some have distinct meanings when applied to different cultures or ethnicities (Reynolds, 2019). When diverse teams come together, they will teach each other new things vital to the dancing class. Equally, this creates a broader perception for students in dance education to learn from and practice.
More Excellent Opportunities for Personal and Professional Growth
Comprehensive and customarily diverse institutions will attract intelligent, determined, and globally minded individuals who will value the potential for personal and professional growth. Generally, the students enrolled in the dance education program will be enriched with many skills they will share with other new students, bringing them together in unity. Learning with individuals from different cultures can be genuinely inspiring, as it allows others to learn about diverse perspectives and ethnicities. Bonding over collective interests and differences can help one become a global inhabitant, allowing them to cast off prejudices and adopt a progressively valued, ethnocentric worldview (Reynolds, 2019).
Diverse Cultural Perspectives Spurring Innovation And Creativity
Our culture influences how one observes the world. Various perspectives, combined with a global squad’s assorted individual and specialized knowledge, can offer new outlooks that stimulate associates to see the institution and the world in fresh ways. Multiple viewpoints, voices, and personalities can bounce off each other, leading to unconventional thinking (Reynolds, 2019). Reasonably, students will value creativity as a means to learn from one another, thus perfecting what they have learned from others. By perfecting what they have learned, they will be able to be more creative and inspire others in the field who may want to learn about dance.
Attracting and Retaining the Top Talent Dancers
With multiculturalism, students from different backgrounds can perform better, and in the process, they can be retained in the institution that offers dance education. Reasonably, this acts as a way through which a talent earns an individual some good work, thus diversifying more within the institution (Reynolds, 2019). Equally, more people will learn from the retained students for dancing classes since they have done perfectly before being owned by the institution. Similarly, the institution will not incur many expenses in hiring good dancers to teach other new students in the dancing class. Hence, it is an added advantage to the institution, as they will keep focusing on nurturing their products and positively influencing their lives.
Roles of Multiculturalism in Dance Education
Multicultural education aims to provide justifiable, enlightening opportunities for all students by changing the general school setting to replicate the many cultures and sets within a community and classrooms. When no equity exists in any organization, the institution will never grow. Equally, it implies that other students who want to take similar dance classes in the same institution will never be motivated to join (Reynolds, 2019). Hence, the institution will miss an opportunity to have students from diverse backgrounds and will never have a diversity of knowledge to share.
Construction and Transformation of Knowledge
Content about ethnic and cultural sets is moved from the limits to the program’s midpoint using the Transformation Approach. It permits students to understand how information is shaped and replicates the producers’ experiences, values, and viewpoints. The program’s attention is no longer on mainstream and controlling groups but somewhat on an incident or notion surveyed from various angles. The curriculum’s structure, assumptions, and views are attuned in this approach so that the concepts, occasions, and issues presented are seen through various racial, ethnic, and cultural groups (Reynolds, 2019).
Personal, Social, and Civic Action
Multicultural education aims to assist scholars in gaining the info and binders essential to make thoughtful decisions and take personal, communal, and civic acts to support equality and autonomous existence (Reynolds, 2019). Scholars benefit from openings for action because they grow a logic of individual and civic effectiveness, the conviction in their ability to effect change in the organizations they live and situations in which they can put what they have learned into practice.
Role of Gender in Enhancing Dance Education in Higher Institutions of Learning
Dispensing knowledge to both female and male genders comprises much training and preserving information from the dancing teachers (Anttila, Martin, and Nielsen, 2019). When it comes to ballet dance style, for example, males must be tall, and females must be somewhat shorter so that when stretching out their legs, they do not exceed the male gender’s height. Similarly, the dancing moves must rhyme with the body to be practiced.
Likewise, it implies that the body of the female or the male gender has to be flexible and able to move. There are positions that a male or female gender can play in the dance industry, and roles that a male or female gender cannot perform. These are taught in a dancing class at a higher education institution, ensuring that both genders can dance when appropriate.
Physical techniques among the female and male genders must be given priority when it comes to dancing. Reasonably, people from diverse backgrounds embrace different physical methods in dancing styles (Zhu, 2018). Equally, these dancing styles communicate how people preserve or respect their culture without going against it. Similarly, these can only be shaped in a dancing class education, as people will be taught how to preserve their culture through different physical techniques.
Various studies have found that, whereas sports are typically associated with masculine experiences and presumably virile mental characteristics, dancing is seen as a feminine activity, suspicious of a man’s physique. As a result, most women prefer to learn to dance in non-traditional settings (Anttila, Martin, and Nielsen, 2019). Furthermore, because women are more adaptive than men, there are many more female dance teachers in dance classes than males.
Because dancing is often connected with a feminine ideal or dominant gender portrayal, the lessons on femininity taught in dance schools are similar to those taught elsewhere: be quiet, obey, be kind, and be pretty. Many dance programs reinforce women’s societal expectations in this approach, resulting in female subjectivities corresponding to gender norms. On the other hand, male dancers are humiliated and bullied due to the exact hegemonic depictions.
Dancing rendering, too many people are associated only with the female gender. Reasonably, female dancers are employed mainly when one wants their music to do well. However, males have also been in the industry but have not been well recognized. The limited knowledge in the art industry has caused the male gender to be forgotten as more females are deployed to act in the dance (Anttila, Martin, and Nielsen, 2019). For instance, the ballet dancing style is mainly meant for ladies, but at the same time, it requires the understated male’s effort to help ensure that the dance is enticing.
Typically, dance is only successful when both genders are involved in a manner that balances gender equality. Several features will always emerge when female and male genders actively participate in a dance class. Equally, with one gender, many features will not be noticed, and this will imply that people or the students in a dance class will be limited in skills that different genders perform.
In addition, dance is indeed influenced by other people’s cultures (Anttila, Martin, and Nielsen, 2019). When these people from diverse cultures come together in a class, they will always share their culture through dance, and other people will learn. In some cultures, the female and male genders have different roles, which will be implemented in dance class education.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this study suggests that gender generates dissimilar senses for male and female students when living and undergoing their bodies in dance, even when more modern approaches allow for higher self-determination in movement building. The teachers encouraged the transposing of gender-based body standards in the scenarios they witnessed. It was an effective means to relativize the conceptions of feminization in some high-quality dance routines. However, such behaviors were limited to male pupils, who exhibited lower levels of originality from the outset.
Reference List
Anttila, E., Martin, R. and Nielsen, C.S. (2019) ‘Performing difference in/through dance: The significance of dialogical, or third spaces in creating conditions for learning and living together, Thinking Skills and Creativity, 31, pp. 209-216.
Daniel Albert, B., (2019). Zero-sum Games & Zero-sum Frames: Employee Cognitive Consequences of Financial Firm Performance – ProQuest. Web.
Lacono, V., (2022). Transmission of Dance and Heritage and body & objectified capital.. [online] World Dance Heritage Research Centre.
Mills, D., (2021). Dance and Activism. Bloomsbury.
Mao, R. (2021) The Design on Dance Teaching Mode of Personalized and Diversified in the Context of the Internet. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 251). EDP Sciences.
Reynolds, K. (2019) 13 benefits and challenges of cultural diversity in the workplace | Hult International Business School. Hult International Business School.
Zhu, M. (2018) The Analysis on the Role of Dance Education in College Education. Atlantis Press. In 2018 8th International Conference on Management, Education, and Information (MEICI 2018) (pp. 1192-1196).