Tracing Lines of Meaning: A Course Redesign for Dance Pedagogy

ABSTRACT

The 21st-century dance milieu demands that a dancer possess a highly diverse skill set, including effective teaching skills and a broader appreciation of a pedagogical orientation. It is vital that in preparing dance educators, we create opportunities for students to reflect on their dance learning histories and consequential beliefs about teaching, and that we use this and other strategies to open meaningful windows into self, others, and the course content. Focusing on practice, this article documents my efforts to redesign a more potent dance pedagogy course from a topic-centered design to one that is centered on meaningful experiences. In this explication, I outline Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning, an effective guide in this redesign process. Finally, I detail a sample assignment from this new course, a digital story project, which calls on prior beliefs about teaching and also evidences technology's potential role in facilitating meaningful learning.