Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Dance BA Curriculum

by Deborah Black, MA Thesis in Dance Education

Research Abstract

The liberal arts model in higher education in the United States offers students experiences designed to facilitate connections with themselves, their peers, and society. These experiences are rooted in democratic values and liberation, through a broad exposure to knowledge that facilitate the critical thinking of citizens. However, students of dance often receive professional training in higher education instead of liberal arts study through predominanatly authoritarian, teacher-centered methods of pedagogy which are criticized as ineffective in educating democratic citizens. This student-centered curriculum model offers an alternative to the professionally-oriented programs that have a largely Eurocentric conservatory training curricula of ballet and modern dance as a provocation to shift these hierarchies within universities driven by research. 

Introduction

This curriculum argues for dance’s placement in the liberal arts as a knowledge-forming subject thereby allowing it to play a powerful role in expanding dance as an artform and opening its access and value to all students in higher education. In addition to studio classes and credited dance clubs, students would participate in year-long seminars and laboratories designed to fully contextualize dance forms, facilitate interdisciplinary thinking, and support student-led research, scholarship, innovation, and art-making. This new approach to dance as an academic subject embedded within the matrix of the liberal arts would offer students a way to begin to grapple with the body as a site for knowledge-formation and interdisciplinarity, both of which could begin much needed work of decoloniality within the university. 

Methods/Data

After a thorough review of literature, the following aim, goals, and objectives were created for the curriculum. 

Aim 

The aim of this curriculum is to question and change higher education’s outdated approaches and goals for teaching and learning dance, allowing it to create new knowledge and engaged, artist-citizens.  

Goals

Through a student-centered, interdisciplinary curriculum, students locate and investigate connections with other subjects so they can acquire a broad understanding of dance as an art practice and cultural phenomenon. They create connections with themselves, investigate democratic principles with their peers and teachers, and design and generate connections with extended communities. Over their four years, they build identities as empowered, informed and ethical artist-citizens.

Objectives

  • Students demonstrate an ability to write, respond, and think critically. 

  • Students practice self-reflection and awareness to foster a deeper connection to themselves and what they are learning. 

  • Students engage in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, and philosophy courses and synthesize the foundations of these subjects with dance. 

  • Students investigate democratic processes and demonstrate development of empathy and ethics through collaboration. 

  • Students grow their understandings of democratic principles by engaging in active discussion and listening with their peers and teachers. 

  • Students design and initiate opportunities to connect with extended communities through their art practices based on their personal artistic philosophies. 

Results

The liberal arts and student-centered critical pedagogies create –

  • Connections to self, others, community

(Barr, 2009; Dewey, 1938; Giroux, 2007; Greene, 1998; Hadley, 2009; hooks, 1994; Mehrens, 2017; Messina, 2021; Mulcahy, 2010; et. al.)

  • Artists and Art NEED these Connections

(Jelinek; 2013; Mabingo, 2020; Musil, 2010)

  • Therefore artists are better supported by a liberal arts education 

  • These connections create – Knowledge, Interdisciplinarity, Decoloniality

(Banerjee, 2010; Cruz Banks, 2010; Kaktikar, 2020; Mabingo, 2020; Spatz, 2016; Timperley & Schick, 2022)

Curriculum Map

Content Summary

Academic Study

  • Reading scholarly texts, writing academic papers

  • Group discussions

  • Understanding and conducting research 

Studio practice

  • Movement classes and dance clubs

  • Developing individual creative practices

  • Making interdisciplinary connections

  • Collaborative artistic experimentation

Community engagement

  • Initiating performances and events 

  • Meeting and interviewing local artists

  • Presentations of research

Discussion

Findings and Implementation

In order to implement successfully, the three emerging topics – dance knowledge, interdisciplinarity, and decoloniality point to a much more prescient need for dance to be placed in the liberal arts beyond the cultivation of artists (as in the traditional conservatory model). The curriculum addresses these emergent findings and begins the interdisciplinarity’s reach into decoloniality. It aims to bring the body into the academy as a source of knowledge that can begin to heal the body/mind split. The curriculum is within the liberal arts, art, and student-centered pedagogies. It makes connections, not isolation. It invites engaged citizens. The way that humans engage in the world, after all, is through their bodies. 

A Metaphor for the Curriculum

The Webb Bridge in Melbourne, Australia is a metaphor for this curriculum model. The bridge aspect of the metaphor is simple – there is an entrance and there is an exit. The entrance to a four-year liberal arts education is the first freshman seminar and the exit is the second senior seminar. The decommissioned railway end of Webb Bridge is long and straight with a few metal archways overhead. This represents the student’s first encounters with new subjects and contexts. It connects the experience for the student from their personal experience and into the web of the interdisciplinary, liberal arts experience. 

The bridge does not suspend high away from a body of water or another piece of land. It hovers quite closely to the water it covers, symbolizing the curriculum’s desire to stay closely connected to the community while still giving the developing artist the safe spaces to experiment with emergent ideas. The bridge’s design also represents the European imprint on Australia and its reconciliation with indigeneity. The shape of the bridge is that of an indigenous eel trap and bends on itself. The bridge was also designed with the site in mind, keeping it out of the ivory tower image of transcending what is around it, and dominating the landscape, but working with the place and the needs of the community. 

The exit of the bridge opens the student into the complex web of ideas that surrounds everyone in the world. The dance student completes the degree with multiple disciplines, and a wealth of knowledge and connections ready to enter the world as engaged artist citizens. 

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Acknowledgements

Thank you so much to the NYU Steinhardt Dance Education Program for guiding me through this process. Thank you especially to Dr. Susan Koff, my advisor and professor for this curriculum seminar. 

Deborah Black