Welcome to the first special issue of Dance Education in Practice. The focus for this special issue is community dance practices, a term that can apply to a wide variety of settings and participants. For the purposes of this publication, community dance is defined as any dance that is relevant to or emerges from the concerns of a specific group. The connection within the community could be based on geography, age grouping, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or another uniting factor, such as medical diagnosis or physical disability. This issue includes five very different articles that suggest the broad range of students and educators who are involved in this field. The students covered in this issue range from preschool children to senior adults and the settings represent the Midwest and both coasts of the United States, as well as Hong Kong.
As different as these dance experiences are, they have several concerns in common. Community dance practices often have issues of sustainability sometimes connected with inconsistent attendance due to transportation challenges or medical and legal issues with the participants. You will see several solutions to this challenge in these articles that are tailored to the specific dance setting, such as those crafted for senior adults by Naomi Goldberg-Haas or women in drug and human trafficking rehabilitation by Connie Bergstein Dow. Community dance settings are complex and pleasing all the constituents in a particular setting is another common challenge that you will also see threading through these articles. This makes communication a key skill in community dance practices, as educators navigate working with large agencies, as in the first article by Cherie Hill and Nancy Ng working with Child Protective Services, or entire school populations as is the case with the final article by Cindy L. Chan working with all the students, faculty, and alumni of Ying Wa Girls' School. Another commonality in the field that is highlighted by these articles is the use of team teaching or dance assistants as a pedagogical strategy. These could be members of the community, trained educators, or university interns, as in the article by Jessica C. Warchal-King working with college dancers and patients with Parkinson's disease. This strategy layers the teaching of community populations with multiple levels of learning and engagement. It also highlights the humility with which a teacher in community dance must approach the students. You will note the respect for the populations being taught and their unique experiences that pervades the writing in these articles. Issues of traditional didactic power and authority are missing from the postures of these teachers, whose pedagogy acknowledges the power that dance has in uniting and equalizing all of us under our common love for movement.
Two of these articles begin with dialogue as if a story is unfolding. This is so typical of the flavor of teaching in community dance. The humanity of the situation is so vibrant that it becomes a story that needs telling. It's about who these dancers are and what dance can do for them that makes community dance a special teaching context. I am grateful to the richly skillful educators who are sharing their expertise and experiences in these articles to deepen all of our knowledge in community dance practices.