‘Free but not free-free’: teaching creative aspects of dance in physical education teacher education

ABSTRACT

Background

There is a global consensus that stimulating and fostering children’s creativity in education is crucial. Addressing creativity has become an imperative in educational policies and in school curricula internationally. School-based physical education (PE), and specifically the teaching area of dance, has been identified as an important pedagogical setting within which to develop creativity. Existing studies have suggested, however, that dance is seldom taught in PE in ways that acknowledge creative aspects of movement learning. Scholars have claimed that teaching pre-arranged dances with predetermined movement outcomes dominate dance teaching in PE. Furthermore, studies have asserted that the overarching regulative principles of PE and PETE that privilege sport skills and physical exercise hinder creative movement learning. Still, dance teaching is frequently seen as part of expressive dance teaching in PE and PETE and is regarded as holding potential in the area of education for creativity. Little scholarly attention has been given to how teacher educators approach creative aspects in dance teaching.

Purpose

This article aims to create insights into how PETE teacher educators understand and work with creative aspects of dance in their educational practice.

Method and theory

To address our aim, we investigate how teacher educators describe their teaching of creative aspects of dance. To do this, empirical material was generated through qualitative interviews with PE teacher educators from each of the PETE institutions in Sweden. The theoretical concepts of smooth and striated spaces and experimentation by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were used to guide the analysis of how the PETE educators described their teaching of creative aspects of dance. Deleuze and Guattari developed a framework that concerned questions of creativity and newness. Despite this conceptual framework having not yet been used in dance education in PE and PETE, their writing fits well when analysing questions of creativity in an educational context.

Findings

We identified three major themes relating to creativity in the empirical material: (a) creative aspects of expressive dance; (b) challenges that teacher educators face when introducing movement exploration in expressive dance to their students, and; (c) the teacher educators’ pedagogical work with students.

Discussion

The results of this study show that teaching expressive dance can take teaching in PE and PETE in new directions. The results provide insights into alternative ways of teaching in these educational settings that can counter the dominant ways of teaching dance. Results suggest that teacher educators operate in various striated spaces that are shaped by expectations and conventions. In such spaces, the educators aim to create momentary passages of smoothening that open up for experimentation and the development of students’ creativity. The results also suggest that expressive dance in PE and PETE emphasizes creative movement learning through which students learn to operate within new and unpredictable situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• dance
• physical education teacher education
• Deleuze
• experimentation

Introduction

There is a global consensus that stimulating and fostering children’s creativity in education is crucial (Neville and Makopoulou 2020; Sharp 2004; NACCCE 1999). Addressing creativity has become an imperative in educational policies and in school curricula internationally (Bereczki and Kárpáti 2018). Creativity encompasses young people’s capabilities to solve problems, respond to new stimuli, and adapt to unexpected situations (Neville and Makopoulou 2020; Beghetto and Kaufman 2014). School-based physical education (PE), and specifically the teaching area of dance, has been identified as an important pedagogical setting within which to develop creativity (Marquis and Metzler 2017; Carlberg and Nyberg 2015; Torrents et al. 2013; Lundvall and Meckbach 2012). Commentators have suggested that dance in education, and especially expressive dance education, has the potential to develop the creativity of the next generation of citizens (Gilbert 2015). Several studies have suggested, however, that dance is seldom taught in PE in ways that acknowledge creative aspects of movement learning (Ekberg 2016; Carlberg and Nyberg 2015; Baker 2015; Rustad 2012). Scholars have claimed that teaching pre-arranged dances dominates dance teaching in PE (Mattsson and Larsson 2020; Quennerstedt 2013). In such teaching, desired movement outcomes are predetermined and evaluated against pre-planned goals. Although teaching formalized dances may offer pupils opportunities to solve problems and respond to new stimuli, creative movement learning is not a primary concern. Gard (2006) even asserts that technique-oriented teaching in PE constitutes ‘the tyranny of the anti-aesthetic’ (237) and hinders creative movement learning.

The concern with ‘correct’ performance in PE is not altogether surprising given that teaching in physical education teacher education (PETE) is often focused on the correctness of technique (Backman and Larsson 2013; Kirk 2010). This focus relates to dance in PETE (Backman, Nyberg, and Larsson 2020). Pre-service teachers who are learning to teach dance primarily learn how to teach a number of formalized dances or reproduce set movement sequences. In contrast, expressive dance teaching in PE and PETE, aim to stimulate students’ abilities to respond to new stimuli as well as to adapt to unexpected situations while dancing (Mattsson and Larsson 2020; Lundvall and Meckbach 2008). It is thus the teaching area of expressive dance that holds potential in the area of education for creativity.

In this paper, we propose that teacher educators who teach dance have a substantial impact on whether future PE teachers will teach creative aspects of dance, and consequently on how future generations of pupils will develop movement creativity in schools. Teacher educators’ views of the creative aspects of dance teaching have received relatively little scholarly attention (Ørbæk and Engelsrud 2020). As a consequence, we know little about if or how teacher educators consider issues of creativity in teaching. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to create insights into how PE teacher educators understand creative aspects of dance in their educational practice.

Background

Dance has been part of PE in countries such as England, Sweden and the US since the early 1900s. At first, dance was mainly part of curricula for younger children and girls. At that time, women were responsible for the teaching of dance, and dance education included a significant aesthetic dimension (Kirk 2010). Later, as PE and PETE became coeducative, dance education was offered to all children, and both men and women were expected to teach dance (Vertinsky and Kirk 2016). In this process, the overarching regulative principles of PE that privileged sport skills and physical exercise (Mattsson and Lundvall 2015) transformed dance education. In line with these dominant regulative principles, dance teaching in PE now often involves either directing pupils to reproduce a set of movement patterns or simply attempting to increase pupils’ heart rates (Carlberg and Nyberg 2015; Gard 2006). Gard adds that curriculum documents that are ‘rich with the language of ‘“healthy lifestyles”’ (2006, 238) further privilege physical exercise as a dominating principle of PE. A pedagogical discourse of dance teaching in which aesthetic and creative aspects are valued has long been marginalized.

Though marginalized, creative aspects of dance are not entirely absent in current PE practices (e.g. MacLean 2018; Swedish Schools Inspectorate 2018). In PETE, such aspects are present in curricula documents. Sweden’s largest PETE program, for example, includes the statement, ‘the main theme of Movement and Dance is movement communication where creation and exploration from a didactical perspective is the focal point’ (Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences 2020, authors’ translation). This statement suggests that teacher educators may well be concerned with creativity (see also Baker 2015) but until the views of teacher educators are investigated, it is difficult to know in what ways this is the case.

With respect to PE, research suggests that the teaching area of expressive dance, sometimes called creative dance (Ørbæk and Engelsrud 2020; Baker 2015), provides conditions for movement exploration. As Larsson and Karlefors (2015) note, teaching in this area rarely prescribes how learners should move or act, and their movements and actions are supposed to emerge through a process of exploration. Other researchers support an explorative approach to dance, suggesting that when pupils and students are taught creative aspects of dance, teachers will provide learners with assignments that involve improvising (Rustad 2012), interpreting stories through movement (Baker 2015), problem-solving (Torrents et al. 2013), and creating movement phrases (Carlberg and Nyberg 2015).

Scholars have noted that exploration is not a uniform process and that in practice, it often varies according to the teacher’s and students’ prior experiences (Lundvall and Maivorsdotter 2010). When teachers are more experienced with expressive dance teaching, they are more likely to generate conditions for unpredictable situations to occur that can lead to learning in new ways (Mattsson and Larsson 2020).

Some scholars have also pointed to the importance of music in promoting creativity in expressive dance situations and have suggested that music has a marked impact on how students engage in movement exploration (Carlberg and Nyberg 2015). Using music in teaching can either inspire or restrict an exploration of new and unexpected movements depending on teachers’ choices of music.

In short, creative aspects have been a consideration in dance education in PE for some time and there is some evidence that these aspects are occurring in PE lessons (e.g. Mattsson and Larsson 2020; Baker 2015; Torrents et al. 2013). Research also suggests that creative aspects can make valuable contributions to the development of learners (Mattsson and Larsson 2020; Larsson and Karlefors 2015). At the same time, very little scholarly attention has directly focused on how teacher educators understand creativity as an element of dance teaching. As stated, the aim of this article is to create insights into how PE teacher educators understand creative aspects of dance in their educational practice. To address this aim, we explore how teacher educators describe their teaching of creative aspects of dance. The empirical material is generated through interviews with PE teacher educators and the analysis is inspired by Deleuzeguattarian theory, described in the next section.

Theoretical framework

Our handling of teacher educators’ descriptions of creativity in dance education is supported by a process-oriented conceptualisation provided by French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. To further conceptualize creativity in dance education, we borrow the notions of smooth and striated spaces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and experimentation (May 2005; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Although neither Deleuze nor Guattari considered education in any detail – Deleuze (1994) wrote a few notes on learning and teaching – their ideas offer multiple ways to discuss the teaching of creative aspects of dance in PETE.

Following on from the French philosophical traditions of existentialism and poststructuralism, Deleuze and Guattari developed an ontological thinking that concerned questions of creativity and newness. Their writing is permeated by their own insistent attempt to move beyond pregiven positions and already defined possibilities (Olsson 2009). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss the concepts of smooth and striated spaces in relation to numerous fields of knowledge from textiles to mathematics, and the concepts have been used to describe pedagogical practices in various areas of research (Rosenlund Hansen, Weinreich Hansen, and Kristensen 2017; Johansson 2015; Youdell and Armstrong 2011). However, this conceptual framework has not yet been used in dance education in PE and PETE. Striated spaces are constituted by fixed points that control trajectories (going from one predetermined point to another). In relation to pedagogical practices, the striated can be said to reflect a structured space in which actions are predefined according to specific teaching aims. Thus, striation defines practice and meaning (Rosenlund Hansen, Weinreich Hansen, and Kristensen 2017; Youdell and Armstrong 2011). In contrast, in smooth spaces, the points are open and change according to the journey itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In an educational setting, smooth spaces can thereby suggest spaces of exploration and creation. Those who inhabit smooth spaces and manage to remain in them are referred to as nomads by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). For Deleuze and Guattari, a nomad is one who does not depart but instead clings to the smooth space offered to him and does not move. Adkins (2015) questions Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term noting that movement is typically seen as the defining characteristic of nomads. Here, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) distinguish the nomad from the migrant. The migrant is someone who goes from one point to another, where the first point is a familiar one and the second point uncertain and unforeseen. With the migrant, striated spaces are disrupted and momentary passages of smoothening emerge that allow for the flow of unpredictable movement (Rosenlund Hansen, Weinreich Hansen, and Kristensen 2017; Johansson 2015). The nomad, in contrast, rests in the smooth space without any specific trajectories for movement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

A second central concept borrowed from the Deleuzeguattarian theoretical framework for this study is experimentation (May 2005). In putting forth an experimental philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim that for one to reach full creative potential, one must ‘lodge [one’s] self on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). Olsson (2009) notes that the Deleuzeguattarian notion of experimentation differs from the positivist idea of experimentation as controlling parameters and working towards an expected outcome. She argues that experimentation suggests a way for preschool teachers to work whereby the children’s subjectivity and learning are seen as never really possible to predict, control, supervise or evaluate against predefined goals. Like Olsson, Johansson (2015) challenges preconceptions and limitations in pedagogical contexts by acknowledging what she terms as the ‘not-yet seen’ in educational practices. May (2005) concurs with Olsson and Johansson, adding that creativity is central to experimentation and that to experiment is to act without any assurance about the results of one’s experimenting. In May’s reading of Deleuze (2005), experimentation is never finished; one does not reach a state where a creative process is exhausted: ‘there is always more [to experiment with]’ (172). When thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, teaching becomes an explorative project ‘that offers us no guarantees, because it is always other and more than we can imagine’ (May 2005, 152).

The concepts of smooth and striated spaces and experimentation can be used to analyze pedagogical practices, such as teaching dance, as they conceptualize the relations between predetermined structures and unpredictable creative processes. This conceptual framework is utilized in the study to analyze how PE teacher educators describe their teaching of creative aspects of expressive dance.

Method

To provide insights into how PE teacher educators understand creative aspects of dance in their educational practice, a qualitative interview study was designed and implemented. Below we present the sample and recruitment, procedures, and how data from the interview study were analyzed. This is followed by a consideration of ethics in the study.

Sample and recruitment

One teacher educator was selected from each of the eight PETE institutions in Sweden to participate in the investigation (n = 8). A purposive sampling strategy (Patton 2002) was used, and each participant was primarily responsible for the dance education at their respective PETE institutions. Four of the participants had completed bachelor degrees in PE, while the other four had completed a bachelor degree in dance pedagogy. Three of them had been working as a PETE teacher educator for a few years, while five of them had been working more than ten years as a PETE teacher educator. In terms of the sample and the study’s trustworthiness, these teacher educators were seen as ‘information-rich cases’ (Patton 2002, 230), from which we could learn a great deal about dance teaching within the context of PETE dance education and more specifically, the issue of creativity. All eight teacher educators were contacted via email and received written information about the nature of the study along with an invitation to take part. All individuals who were contacted accepted the invitation and interviews were scheduled for times and places of the interviewees’ choices.

Procedures

Semi-structured interviews were conducted to provide detailed information about the teacher educators’ experiences and views of teaching expressive dance. All interviews were conducted by the first author. All interviews but one were done in a private space at the PETE institution where the interviewees worked. One of the eight teacher educators was interviewed when visiting the institution where the interviewer worked, and one was teaching at the same institution as the interviewer. The structure of the interviews was flexible with an intention to provide both interviewer and interviewee with an openness to pose new questions and address aspects that cannot be predicted in advance (Arthur and Nazroo 2003). The interview questions focused on the participants’ experiences of creative aspects in dance teaching and followed two overarching lines of inquiry: (a) content and structures in teaching when exploration and creation are of central concern, and (b) notions of creativity. Different follow-up questions were generated to, for instance, collect more reflections on students’ creative movement learning. This open approach also allowed the interviewer to alter both the order of the questions and the way in which they were phrased. Each interview was approximately 80 min long.

Analysis

All interviews were transcribed verbatim by the first author, in total 112 pages single spaced. Transcription notation included pauses (marked by three dots) and intonations (emphasized in italics). In this study, the analysis was inspired by an abductive approach (Graneheim, Lindgren, and Lundman 2017) together with an iterative process guiding the analytical procedure. This process was characterized by a systematic and repetitive process where data and theory were continuously re-visited and discussed by the involved researchers in terms of, for example, differences, similarities, themes and subthemes (Graneheim, Lindgren, and Lundman 2017). Through this iterative process, the researchers developed a shared understanding that formed the basis of the interpretation of the empirical material.

The first step of reading was inductive in that it involved a search for patterns as well as deductive. In the second step, the first author focused on two analytical questions while examining the data: (1) How do smooth and striated spaces unfold in the teachers’ descriptions of teaching creative aspects of dance? and (2) How do the teachers speak of their teaching in terms of teaching experimentation? The analysis was read and commented on by all authors. As the last step, quotes were sorted into themes such as ‘Teachers describe pedagogies of smooth spaces’ that corresponded to each analytical question. Possible subthemes were identified, such as ‘Guiding the students and making the students feel safe’. Finally, the themes and subthemes were discussed amongst the authors in light of the two analytical questions.

Ethical considerations

Ethical requirements laid out by the Swedish Research Council guided practices during the investigation (Swedish Research Council 2017). All participants were informed that their participation was voluntary and that they could cancel their participation at any time. Each participant signed a consent form that was counter-signed by the first author. Audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews were kept on an external hard drive secured at the PETE institution of the first author. In terms of attempting to maintain the anonymity of the participants, information that could lead to identification was omitted from documents intended for publication.

It is worth noting that the first author was professionally acquainted with several of the participants before data production began. In interviewing, a familiarity between interviewer and interviewee can be regarded as a strength that increases trustworthiness and helps both interviewer and interviewee to ‘see new and deeper meanings as they discuss the topic of mutual interest’ (Chen and Ennis 2012, 235). Such familiarity almost certainly affected the interviews as known participants could refer to knowledge or experiences that they shared with the interviewer and possibly felt more at ease with the interviewer than those participants who were not already acquainted with the interviewer. The interviewer too needed to adjust questions slightly to address the same topic. For example, it was necessary at times to provide hypothetical situations with comments such as ‘Imagine that I knew nothing about your course … ’. Because several of the participants were known to the first author it was important to, in the second step of the analysis, bring in the other authors that had not been part of the teaching and data collection process. In general though, familiarity tended to be experienced as a resource (heightening rapport and openness) rather than a barrier to open communication.

Results

We identified three major themes relating to creativity in the teacher educators’ data: (a) creative aspects of expressive dance; (b) challenges that teacher educators face when introducing movement exploration in expressive dance to the students, and; (c) the teacher educators’ work with students in a pedagogical sense.

Creative aspects: process-oriented exploration

The teacher educators (from here referred to as TEs) claimed that focusing on process rather than the outcome was central to teaching creative aspects of dance. The participants stressed the importance of not knowing in advance what particular movements would emerge in the process of movement exploration. One TE stated for example, that it is important to give students opportunities:

to explore without it [the dance] becoming something … something that ought to be remembered, something that ought to be defined … Exploration is not about forcing anything to become something … one ought not be in a hurry for it to become a composition from improvisation … I think it is an incredible.. yes, what is it? Freedom … (TE 4)

Further, all participants maintained that they do not attempt to define particular movement outcomes that should emerge during the students’ movement exploration: ‘everything is allowed … Of course from a perspective of no one being hurt or subjected to any sort of discrimination … all expressions are possible, and … nothing is wrong, everything is right’ (TE 1).

Although some teacher educators stressed a need for students to ‘master’ certain movements or movement sequences, all participants maintained that to explore and create the not yet known should permeate their teaching of expressive dance:

I want to reach there where you do not know now what will happen in twenty-five minutes … there is no clearly predefined path already beforehand … now I want to do this because now I felt a desire for it, it came now … Like ‘well, now this happened’ … and I do not know why I wanted to do that but now I do it … and then there are a few who really get that magic just go for it whatever we do. (TE 4)

This TE underscored the unpredictable nature of explorative movement experiences and claimed that creative aspects in dance teaching are continuously open to evolve in the non-predetermined ways. This sentiment was picked up in other interviews and on several occasions, participants suggested that teaching expressive dance does not involve a clear line between A and B (for instance, an educator’s expected outcomes and the students’ actual outcomes).

A focus on process rather than the outcome was further emphasized by the participants as they described the expressive dance as a transient or temporary form of art:

[to experience] the dance as the ephemeral art form that it is, to just be allowed to be here and now. It [the dance] became something, now it became this, bom, and we move on … It does not need to generate anything. (TE 1)

I can feel more free, that I reach further or deeper into a kind of exploration if I just am allowed to be … here and now (TE 4)

Exploratory processes that involved non-predetermined and unpredictable movements appeared of primary concern to the TEs, although they used different strategies to handle this concern and had different amounts of time allocated for this teaching. As TEs described how they introduced expressive dance to their students, they simultaneously elaborated on various challenges they and their students faced.

Challenges in teaching expressive dance

The participants mainly described two recurring challenges they experienced when attempting to teach creative aspects of dance. First, the participants claimed that the students’ expectations of what they ought to learn interfered with being creative and exploring. Such expectations were typically described by the TEs as a result of either: (1) official prescriptions of PE and PETE that state that learning to dance involves learning to embody pace and rhythm in the movement to music (The Swedish National Agency for Education 2011), or (2) a majority of the students’ lack of experience with dance in general and with explorative aspects of dance in particular. Two TEs commented, for example, that: ‘it is a whole new world for 90 percent of them [the students]’ (TE 8) and ‘most of what we have done is new to them’ (TE 5). A majority of the students seem to have a lack of self-confidence when entering the explorative space of expressive dance teaching in PETE. The TEs pointed out that the students can show self-confidence in other areas of teaching, until they ‘enter this space where they [the students] will show other expressions with the body, and they are not comfortable with that’ (TE 5). This altogether resulted in, as one participant maintained, that students:

can … become frightened when I enter the space and … ‘I don’t want to, I can’t walk in accordance with the beat’ … they get stuck by ‘now we will dance’ … [T]hey bring with them from childhood that they can’t keep the beat, and it sticks with them, they feel soo bad. (TE 8)

Another TE described how students’ expectations are often connected to discomfort:

many [students] enter with the feeling that this is difficult, ‘I am really good at soccer’ … and that one thinks that it is pretty foreign and surely very difficult, and ‘I don’t have any sense of rhythm’. (TE 6)

Students’ expectations of right and wrong movement performances confine teaching of explorative processes. As one TE proposed: ‘it is difficult for them, because it is difficult for them to relax and dare to express themselves … one does not dare because one feels that ‘this can be wrong in some way’ (TE 7). The TEs’ descriptions suggest that students expect dance teaching to be guided by the overarching regulative principles of PE, which involve a focus on the correctness of technique.

Second, the participants stated that a lack of time allocated to dance within their PETE programs inhibited their ability to develop students’ creativity:

if I was to decide we would have shorter lessons during a long period of course. But this is three days [to] work with the artistic … there is not enough time. But if I can offer a small dash of it, to plant a seed … then I have three days to sort of fix it. (TE 8)

Indeed, several of the TEs claimed that it was possible to initiate creative movement learning during PETE but that there is rarely the possibility for further development of such processes. In the section below, we present pedagogies that the TEs employed in order to initiate students’ creative movement learning.

Pedagogies of expressive dance: safety, clear frames, starting from the familiar and playfulness

Here we will present how the TEs describe teaching creative aspects of expressive dance to the students. Overall, the participants’ descriptions indicated a concern to teach the students in ways that the students would experience creative aspects of dance themselves, rather than providing them with suggested methods to use when teaching pupils creative aspects in schools. The participants identified four factors they consider when teaching expressive dance: guidance and safety, articulating frames clearly, starting from the known and familiar, and playfulness.

The participants claimed that guiding their students so that the students experience a safe learning environment is vital when teaching creative aspects in dance. When introducing expressive dance, one TE stated for example, that ‘my role is to guide the students … , provide them with safety, create a learning environment where students feel safe to express themselves’ (TE 1). Some of the participants stressed that guiding needs to be done carefully:

Of course [I] want to have safety in the group so that they dare … But maybe one needs to approach it carefully. It is not possible to charge on, but you sneak it in a little. (TE 5)

Most of the TEs suggested that such processes take time and demand patience. One participant commented, for example:

To dare to step out of one’s own comfort zone … This is really charged. Some can’t handle it. And some come to a standstill. But let them be still just there, just then, and maybe they get more comfortable later on. (TE 1)

Providing a safe learning environment thus seemed to be a crucial way of encouraging creativity for the PETE students. One TE said, for instance:

The students, they are often a bit afraid, they are worried of what will come and how they will handle it … [O]ften in dialogue … they get to open up, and describe, and listen to others, and tag along ‘yes that is how I feel too’. (TE 8)

Second, all participants underscored the importance of providing clearly articulated frames to the students. One TE claimed that: ‘it is frames that … make the student not feel too uncomfortable … there is always a frame, there is always a foundation that they can fall back on’ (TE 1). By using frames the TE’s were able to engage the PETE students during the lessons. As one TE stressed: ‘if one has enough clear frames, … they [the students] get a positive experience of dance where dance is not a matter of right or wrong’ (TE 4). Frames were part of creating freedom for the PETE students to go beyond the comfort of reproducing the already known. Within these frames the students could be free, but as the TE stressed: ‘ … free but not free-free’ (TE 4). The students’ experience of moving freely seemed to depend on clearly communicated structures from the teacher. Three specific frames were recurring in the TEs’ commentaries: providing manageable dance assignments, using theoretical movement frameworks, and working with music. These frames were considered as ways to lead the students into creative work. The TE’s described the use of frames in terms of ‘tricking the students’ (TE 4, 5 and 8) into processes of exploration. The TEs maintained that it is important to employ dance assignments that are both manageable for the students to partake in and that can be developed to encourage further exploration of movement. One TE commented, for example:

when they have started creating a program, ‘well now you have certain movements … that you have decided. But see it as a start, an embryo’ … and then it could be about changing the space, rhythm and the character, or the actual movement. (TE 2)

In addition, they described their use of theoretical movement frameworks, prominently that of Rudolf Laban, to invite students to learn expressive dance. Music also served as a means for educators to frame exploration. By using certain music, the TEs could highlight contrasts and encourage their students to adapt their movement to the music.

Third, the participants stated that it is valuable to start from what is familiar and known to the students when aiming to teach processes of movement exploration. The TEs said on a number of occasions that they draw on their students’ familiarity with sports when initiating processes of exploration. TE 4 stated, for instance:

because they will become PE teachers … sport words, sport movements, one creates a choreography that concerns hammer-throwing. And from that I maybe say again, ‘now you will change this, move in new directions’. (TE 4)

Another way to start from the familiar was to acknowledge factors from other teaching areas in PETE. The TEs described how they sometimes employ movement experiences students have gained through previous courses in order to create an exploratory learning environment. One TE described how for example, movement experiences from gymnastics can unfold in an exploratory process of dance:

they do cart wheeling or hand-stand … and then they will incorporate music and movement or a dance … , then … they move outside of the boundary and create. (TE 5)

Lastly, a ‘playful approach’ (TE 3), is a crucial aspect in the pedagogy of dance exploration and creativity according to the TEs. Playfulness was about not being afraid to make mistakes and not being worried about one’s performance. TE 4 said:

play and creativity and creation are very closely connected … That one … allows oneself to not have those boundaries of what is right and wrong and what is childish. (TE 4)

Playfulness in teaching seemed to correspond to allowing students to explore any expression of movement: ‘playfulness … [entails] an openness that anything can happen’ (TE 1).

Discussion

The aim of this article was to create insights into how PE teacher educators understand creative aspects of dance in their educational practice. The main findings indicate that the PETE educators do have quite specific ideas concerning creative aspects of dance. Teacher educators expect learners’ actions to emerge through processes of movement exploration, and not by the performance of correct or incorrect movements. The results suggest that teacher educators see expressive dance as a way to emphasize creative movement learning whereby students can learn to operate within new and unpredictable situations (Mattsson and Larsson 2020; Quennerstedt 2013; Lundvall and Meckbach 2012; Gard 2006). The results show that aspects of newness permeate teacher educators’ descriptions of teaching and learning of expressive dance. Expressive dance is a new learning experience for the majority of the students. The four factors the teacher educators consider when teaching dance – guidance and safety, articulating frames clearly, starting from the known and familiar, and playfulness – are used to create a space for the students so that they can learn to operate within new and unpredictable situations.

A majority of the respondents articulated that their teaching practice is closely linked to processes of exploring movement expressions. Exploration goes beyond right or wrong ways of doing things and concerns openness and recognition of the not yet known in learning. Yet, there are differences among the PETE educators in terms of how they describe the strategies to handle these concerns and they had different time allocated in their teaching for teaching creative aspects. In addition, the respondents pointed to the importance of music in framing the movement exploration in the teaching (Mattsson and Larsson 2020; Carlberg and Nyberg 2015). By using music, they could encourage the students’ exploratory processes.

Even though the teacher educators all described dance as a way to engage in movement exploration characterized by unpredictability, they seemed well aware that the space for experimentation is constituted by striations. Sometimes striations were described as the official learning outcomes in school for ‘what counts’: to be able to follow certain paces and rhythms. On other occasions, striations were articulated in terms of time constraints for teaching dance. The educators also described working with the expectations of a (perhaps) dominating group of students that are unfamiliar with a moving body not defined by sports skills. These were examples of striations that affect the PETE educators’ approaches to teaching creative aspects of dance. However, striations are not simply to be considered as that which potentially hinders the teaching of creativity. The educators also described how they utilize various sorts of striations to teach creative aspects of dance. For instance, they draw on the students’ familiarity with movement activities defined by sport skills. These striations appear to provide teaching with some elements of predictability, stability and security and thus help construct a supportive environment to foster creative movement learning (Baker 2015). Students are taught in ways by which they – similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s migrant – go from one point to another, where the first point is a familiar one and the second point uncertain and unforeseen. By attending to existing striations, the educators seem to prevent lessons of expressive dance from becoming unpleasantly chaotic and from becoming a space that confirms students’ expectations of dancing as a horrifying experience. Having said that, it appears as though striations are only ever employed in the teaching in order to be disrupted. Striations appear to be a means to ‘trick’ students into momentary passages of smoothening that allow for experimentation. Thus, teaching creative aspects of dance seem to differ from dominating ways of teaching in PE and PETE constituted by fixed striated spaces of predefined actions and corresponding outcomes. Drawing on and simultaneously disrupting striations in teaching might be considered as a way for educators to prepare students to adapt to unexpected situations (Neville and Makopoulou 2020; Beghetto and Kaufman 2014). As soon as students feel safe enough ‘to relax and dare to express themselves’ (TE 7), educators can teach in ways that help students to ‘experiment with the opportunities it [the teaching] offers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). As the data suggest, this is for instance described by all educators to be taught by means of playful teaching. As teaching becomes a ‘project of experimentation’ (May 2005, 111), students’ movement experiences can be regarded as never really possible to predict. The educators set the stage for learning processes of experimentation where there is no assurance about the results of the students’ actions. Findings suggest that expressive dance teaching provides the students with a journey – again, like the one of the migrant – from a space of familiarity to a space that is ‘always other and more than  …  [one] can imagine’ (May 2005, 152).

It is also worth noting what the teacher educators outline as a constitutive creative element of expressive dance; an ephemerality of dance and the sense of ‘here and now’ (TE 1 and 4) while dancing. Not seldom, such descriptions of what is considered a key feature of creativity in dance in education are interpreted as moments of embodied presence or expressions of self (Gilbert 2015; Lundvall and Maivorsdotter 2010). When the educators describe fleeting experiences of expressive dance, they do it in terms of ‘well, now this happened’ … ‘now it became this, bom, and we move on’ (TE 1). A Deleuzeguattarian reading of this central constitutive element of expressive dance teaching in PETE may offer an alternative way of understanding the teaching of creativity. Such reading suggests that experiences of dance are characterized by momentary passages of smoothening that open up for the unknown to dictate what there is to know in dance. Such a reading suggests that the students’ experiences of expressive dance are not to be understood as subjective experiences of presence or self-expression but as situations offering the potential for newness to emerge.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have suggested that the teaching area of dance in PE and PETE are important pedagogical settings within which to develop creativity. By analysing PETE educators’ descriptions of expressive dance teaching, we have identified creative aspects of dance in teaching. By discussing these findings in terms of a teaching practice constitutive of smooth and striated spaces and experimentation, the paper provides insights into various ways of teaching creativity in PETE.

We want to end this paper by looking forward and we are inspired by Johansson’s not-yet seen (2015) view of educational practices. We believe that Johansson, together with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on the nomad (1987), provide an explanatory framework when considering new ways of teaching and thinking about teaching expressive dance in PETE and PE. This framework suggests ways of acknowledging concerns that have seldom been prioritized in these educational contexts – to accommodate future citizens with the creative potential to adapt to (and maybe even appreciate) unexpected situations.

As indicated, pedagogies of expressive dance seem to rely on a trajectory like the one of the migrant; moving from one familiar and safe point to another yet unknown and unforeseen point. We ask ourselves whether teaching expressive dance in PETE could ever depend on other trajectories than that similar to the migrant. Considering the not-yet seen and the nomad, we ask whether expressive dance teaching might be regarded as a nomadic practice in respect to how the teacher educators describe the importance of process-oriented and open-ended conditions for teaching. When describing the importance of such conditions for teaching, the TEs provide a possibility to think of a nomadic teaching practice without any specific trajectories for movement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). A nomadic teaching practice might offer students smooth spaces of expressive dance where an aim is to stay put and explore – but not define – dance. Perhaps if the challenges that the teacher educators face when teaching were addressed, such as time constraints in dance teaching and official prescriptions of learning of dance in PE and PETE, we might see other smooth opportunities for creative aspects in movement learning. For instance, if teacher educators had more time to teach creative aspects of dance, striations might shift considerably, and teachers might enable students to further their exploration. In other words, smoothing the dance space might give opportunities for educators to rely less on the trajectory of the migrant, and more on that of the nomad. Providing teacher educators and pre-service teachers with opportunities to operate as nomads in smooth spaces of teaching may be crucial to address the imperative of fostering creativity of the next generation of citizens.

Imagining an educational setting stimulating creativity characterized by how the teacher educators describe creative aspects of dance in terms of ‘freedom' and ‘openness', where ‘everything is allowed', and where ‘magic' is of primary concern – suggests a nomadic teaching practice. It seems that considering such practice can provide PETE educators with potentially interesting, remarkable, and important ways of teaching expressive dance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2017-03685].