A Gap in the Place Where a Teacher Should Be

Abstract

Embodied experiences and collaborative negotiations are at the centre of dance education practice. Creative pedagogies aim to enable diverse students to give idiosyncratic responses to shared tasks, in such a way that different processes of knowing contribute to the richness of learning processes. Yet maintaining spaces that enable democratic exchange and genuine inclusion is an art form in itself, rife with contradictions and complexities. This chapter, A Gap in the Place Where a Teacher Should Be, explores two narratives that engage with the tensions and contradictions in creating inclusive spaces for creative-arts education. Research in dance education involves careful attendance to modes of interaction and the feelings these produce. Working through narrative and metaphor can enable dance researchers to write into the moving spaces of practice, to engage space, dynamic, emotion and sensory experience in the process of writing. Narrative methodology is a vital tool in communicating the dynamic process of meaning construction occurring through specific dance pedagogies. It can enable the affects and effects of dance education to be meaningful beyond the site of the classroom. Through narrative, dance researchers can move between evocative, multi-perspectival accounts of specific moments, contextual analysis and critical discussion. This chapter presents two narratives from two dance education settings, one pedagogical and one methodological. Ralph Buck’s narrative Do it Or I Will Punish You evokes issues around how dance lecturers mediate student expectations of what it means to ‘control’ a classroom, and questions methods for enabling shifts of power and agency between teacher and student in creative working environments. Alys Longley’s Neurological Outliers is a fictitious story drawn from the authors’ curiosity in overlaps between pedagogies for neurodiverse students and practice-led researchers. It maintains that multi-modal teaching can facilitate democracy. Together, these two narratives employ specific writing strategies and modes of address to evoke how creative education can engage issues of power, cultural expectation, politics and agency.