“Not for Serious Purpose”: Discrepancy between Parent and Child Motivation for Participation in a Community Dance Program

ABSTRACT

During the course of a program evaluation for Footprints Dance Project Society of Alberta, we uncovered a discrepancy between children and parents regarding both motivation for program participation and expected outcomes. At Footprints Dance Project, we work with a diverse group of children, primarily from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Despite advertising ourselves as an organization providing dance programs for children to experience dance—promoting a love of dance and artistic activities—one third of our parents expressed a primary expectation for their child to develop life skills through our program. Thirty-seven percent of our parents did not mention learning dance as an expectation of our community dance program at all. This contrasted starkly with both our child respondents’ motivations as well as our own assumptions. We discuss this dichotomy and its implications in community programming, both for program delivery and recruitment.

KEYWORDS:

• Community dance
• recreation
• motivation
• life skills
• transferable skills
• development

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Dr. Kayien Conner at the University of South Florida, College of Behavioral and Community Sciences for enabling this study through directed research. Thank you to Dr. Linda Callejas for her insights on designing our observation study. Thank you to the staff at Footprints Dance Project for your work collecting data, funding, and program management, and to Nicole Pemberton for teaching some outstanding classes! Thank you to the staff at Wildflower Arts Centre for facilitating our program, and to Joe Kelly for help with the AV equipment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by: Alberta Government – Recreation and Physical Activity Division, Canadian Tire Jumpstart, and the Rozsa Foundation. Winter session funding came through the TELUS Friendly Future Foundation; Government of Alberta [Phase II Micro Grant]; TELUS Friendly Future Foundation [2019100265]; Canadian Tire Jumpstart [35587]; The Rozsa Foundation [20190710].