Stepping out of bounds: Performing feminist pedagogy within a dance education community

Abstract

Sprague (1992) asserts that communication scholars “should be leading other teacher educators”; in communication‐focused research that can better explain how teachers’ behaviors contribute to students’ development of critical consciousness. One useful way of highlighting teachers’ pedagogical behaviors is by viewing them as social performances that can either encourage or subvert students’ abilities and desires to transform society. This critical ethnography examines a dance education culture to see whether or not instructors within this culture perform behaviors that support their espoused critical feminist pedagogical philosophy. Although the authors argue that many of the instructors’ performances help construct a culture in which this philosophy is enacted, they conclude that embedded within some of the instructors’ performances are communicative actions that constrain greatly the development of a truly critical feminist pedagogy.

Keywords:

• critical ethnography
• critical pedagogy
• dance
• dance education
• feminist pedagogy
• pedagogy
• teacher performances
• teaching philosophies