Redesigning pedagogy for boys and dance in physical education

Abstract

Pedagogical practices in schooling bear a potential to impact on student success, achievement and engagement with schooling. This is especially the case for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are deeply dependent on schooling for their educational resources. Central to this paper are pedagogies for social justice and improved engagement of boys in dance within a school located in an area of high socio-economic disadvantage. It is in these areas that boys spend considerable time performing masculinities that are in opposition to the formal processes of schooling, including participation in perceived feminine pursuits. The specific focus of this paper is a project of pedagogical redesign, enacted by a teacher of physical education and dance. The paper will first address pedagogies as they relate to dance, physical education, inclusion and gender. We next describe the action research project before describing redesigned pedagogical processes and outcomes for students. Findings reveal that altered pedagogical practices and relationships resulted in increasing student engagement, as well as broader outcomes across the curriculum. In conclusion we argue for practices that provide safe and supportive learning environments, connect to student life-worlds and extend student skills to offer ‘possibilities’ for boys from disadvantaged backgrounds in dance as well as investment in schooling.

Keywords

Dance gender inclusive education social justice

Introduction

Teachers and their pedagogical practices are fundamental to student achievement and success (Lingard, 2007; Lingard and Mills, 2007). This is especially the case for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are deeply reliant on formal schooling for their educational resources (Hayes et al., 2009). Pedagogies around a new curriculum can bring it to life and can be either powerful and transforming or reinforcing of inequity, difference and traditional gendered subjectivities. This paper is concerned with pedagogies for social justice and improved engagement of boys in the traditionally female domain of dance within a school located in an area of high socio-economic disadvantage. The specific purpose is to document a process of pedagogical redesign, enacted by a teacher of physical education and dance in a school in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, recognised as an area of persistent social and economic disadvantage (Thomson, 2002; Wrench et al., 2013). Dance plays an important role within the broader learning area of physical education in that it offers an alternative mode through which young people can express themselves physically. However, it is also a site where boys’ reluctance to participate has been accepted as natural and normal (Gard, 2008; Sanderson, 2001; Waddington et al., 1998). Consequently, finding ways to include boys’ bodies, interests and backgrounds in dance could work to increase their engagement and expand their physical life choices and potential.

The paper first addresses pedagogies as they relate to dance, inclusion and social justice. We turn then to the possibilities offered by embodied and productive pedagogies as well as understandings around the construction of gender. We next describe the research project by illustrating the pedagogical processes utilised in our case study as well as outcomes for students. In conclusion we argue that embodied and productive pedagogies can support and enhance engagement of boys from disadvantaged backgrounds and make a case for finding different ways of expressing and performing gender.

Social justice agendas

Research continues to show that inequity in schooling in Australia is substantial and persistent (Teese, 2000; Teese et al., 1995). While mandated high-stakes testing supposedly places all students on a common scale, the way that knowledge is conceptualised in tests has an important bearing on inclusion and often fails recognize the ‘abilities’ and embodied knowledge of some children. Most significantly, testing constrains pedagogic possibilities. Teachers move away from employing a suite of pedagogical practices and instead revert to didactic approaches that are tightly controlled and teacher-directed (Comber and Nixon, 2009; Cormack and Comber, 2013). Children become passive receivers of information and are mostly required to keep still. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are overwhelmingly amongst those who continue to be least successful (Comber and Kamler, 2004; Yates, 2013).

While policy changes in the past two decades have made little impact on the ways that schools contribute to the production of inequality (Luke, 2010, 2012), more recent models for improving the curriculum include the development of a national Australian Curriculum (AC). However, assuming that equity will result from the straightforward adoption of the AC underestimates the ‘nuances of local context’ (Thrupp and Lupton, 2006: 309) that significantly shape pedagogical work in schools as well as outcomes for students. Specifically, the gendered nuances of context are central to this paper. While there is a need for better explanations for the persistence of educational inequality, we also need exploration of how teachers improve educational outcomes for those communities that have historically been disadvantaged by schooling (Comber and Kamler, 2004; Hayes et al., 2009). In this work, focus is drawn to the gendered subjectivities of male students that limit their engagement in activities like dance, which have the potential to extend their physical, critical and communicative potential (Gard, 2008; Gerdin, 2015; Harris and Penney, 2000; Risner, 2007). We are also interested in how schools and teachers sustain pedagogical and gender innovation and how they might work with local knowledge, engage with a national curriculum and make it meaningful for disadvantaged students.

Pedagogies of dance and gender

Pedagogies as a social justice issue have implications for the teaching of dance but are more complex than simply teaching dances or dance skills. In this paper we operate from an understanding of pedagogy as complex and encompassing of interrelationships between teachers, students, context and knowledge constructed (Lusted, 1986; Tinning, 2010). Therefore, how one teaches and relates to students as well as the nature of student interactions are all significant to the learning process. Traditional pedagogical practices in dance draw on a didactic relationship between teacher and student, where the teacher is understood to be an expert and students are required to reproduce movement patterns as instructed (Risner and Stinson, 2010). In this way dance teaching reflects the pedagogy of dance training and mostly consists of learning how to follow directions, staying silent and focusing on correctly reproducing movement or ‘getting it right’ (Stinson, 2008). Certainly, when teachers control the pedagogical processes in these ways there is little opportunity for developing interest, engagement and achievement among boys from disadvantaged backgrounds (Hayes et al., 2009; Risner, 2007; Sanderson, 2001; Stinson, 2008).

Additionally, what counts as dance is historically and culturally located (Risner and Stinson, 2010). While all dance is ‘ethnic’, dance pedagogy has traditionally ignored gender, bodies, ethnicity, ability and socio-economic background as drivers of curriculum. Strong and entrenched stereotypes shaped by the media as well as teachers continue to define dance as a ‘girls’’ activity (Gard, 2008; Green, 1999; Sanderson, 2001; Waddington et al., 1998). So too, styles and forms of dance have traditionally required dispositions of order and control, gracefulness and gesture (Stinson, 2008) that work in conflict to traditional presentations of masculinity.

While often constructed as a homogenous group, boys are a diverse population and include those who face persistent patterns of exclusion (Luke, 2010; Scholes and Nagel, 2012). The interactional role between gender and disadvantage in some communities can produce enduring ‘constructions of masculinity many of which are in opposition to the formal processes of schooling as well as perceived feminine pursuits’ (Scholes and Nagel, 2012: 973). In these settings, gender combines with disadvantage and ethnicity to produce expressions of masculinity and physicality where strength and domination are valued and where there are significant risks for boys who step outside these hegemonic boundaries. We turn next to consider how productive and embodied pedagogies may work to unsettle the gendered ‘certainties’ in teaching and learning dance.

Productive and embodied pedagogies

Embodied pedagogies

Recognition of embodied ways of knowing in education signals a shift in pedagogical thinking toward appreciating bodies as agents of knowledge production as well as vehicles for performing gender. Western educational traditions have privileged the mind while suppressing bodily knowledge. According to Evans et al. (2009) we teach in a culture that simultaneously obsesses with bodies but disregards their role in learning. In this work we are interested in the productive role of the body in pedagogic practice. As multisensory devices, bodies can act as pedagogic relays that can be engaged to not only broaden students’ access to knowledge and skill but also to extend presentations of gender. All young people have bodies. They come to school with different body repertoires and habits. They have learned different ways to move (Brown and Penney, 2012). They have embodied their gender (Risner, 2008; Wright, 1999). This research focuses on the ways that pedagogies in dance can challenge traditional representations of gender and become part of the resources available for young people to grow, thrive and critique their gendered performance. We turn now to explore how traditional constructions of gender can be challenged through the body and dance.

Challenging gendered learning

Traditional and essentialist understandings of gender provide an over-simplification of the complex development of gender identity and fail to recognise the socially constructed nature of gender, which is mediated by social class, race, ethnicity and other categories of inequality (Connell, 1995, 2000). In understanding gender as difference and opposition, power relations constitute binary understandings of masculinity that are oppositional and superior to femininity. In taking up these understandings, ‘boy friendly’ strategies have traditionally highlighted the use of single sex classes and role models (Keddie, 2006). However, such strategies make underpinning assumptions of gender as opposition as well as the naturalness of boys’ behaviour and ways of being. They are counter-productive in that they reinforce and leave unquestioned a narrow and problematic version of masculinity (Ward, 2014). In addressing calls to move beyond these simplistic understandings, Wright (1999) and Keddie (2005, 2006) draw attention to the social construction of gender. In drawing on the work of Butler (1993, 1997, 2004), gender is understood as processes of doing and performing. Gender is constituted in repetitive and performative acts of the body. Moreover, when gender is constituted by ‘expressions’ of the self, these are also said to be its results (Ward, 2014). In a panoptic sense, gender is socially constructed and cannot be separated from the cultural context or pedagogical work (Ingrey, 2012).

According to Keddie (2006) transformative gender practice entails deeper and more complex understanding of gender as well as an appreciation of pedagogy as a critical practice. In taking up these positions, teachers might view a managerial rather than pedagogical focus to be counter to generating male engagement (Martino et al., 2004). Keddie (2006) also highlights the potentialities of a ‘productive pedagogies’ approach in connecting with boys and enhancing their educational outcomes. Productive pedagogies are understood to be educationally demanding, socially supportive, connected to students’ life-worlds and recognising of difference (Gore et al., 2004; Keddie, 2005; Lingard et al., 2003). By expanding expectations of what it means to be male through bodily engagement that differs from expressions of power, aggression and competition, male students can explore popular culture as well as broaden their understandings of gender to include dance.

Scholes and Nagel (2012) believe that engagement in the creative arts has much to offer boys in terms of physical, social and cognitive development as well as opportunities to deconstruct binary dichotomies around gender. Dance, in particular, can be used to connect with the life-world of boys by positioning their interests as key to the creative process and broadening what has traditionally been perceived as feminine (Lingard and Douglas, 1999). Central to this process are supportive learning environments and altered student–teacher relationships that break down power imbalances and broaden boys’ enactments of masculinity through legitimising alternatives to a dominance model.

Scherpf (2006) offers ‘rap pedagogy’ as a means to facilitate learning around a peer culture as well as spaces of resistance to the complexities and contradictions of postmodern life. Additionally, Stinson (2008) highlights the importance of providing opportunities for creative self-expression. While the hip hop culture, from which rap expressions have emerged, has been globalised, there is an implicit critique of whiteness and institutionalised oppression within the genre. It is here that rap or hip hop dance can provide a space for young people to articulate their resistance. By incorporating popular culture and centralising the student experience these embodied forms can work to recover the ‘knowledges, voices and histories’ of those who have traditionally been excluded (Scherpf, 2006: 87).

Engaging with these dance forms might then offer boys a popular cultural expression through which they can dismantle a negatively prescribed identity and give physical expression to a range of issues around youth identity and fragmentation. Not to be romanticised as miraculous, concerns still lie around the use of rap dance to reinforce cultural stereotypes and maintain a group/‘thug’ identity (Scherpf, 2006). However, as movement forms less associated with women, rap and hip-hop might provide a safe beginning to unlock ways of doing ‘male’ and enable multiple performances.

We next describe the action research project before discussing and illustrating the pedagogical processes utilised in our case study and outcomes for participants.

The project

Practitioner action research

Action research features ‘self-reflective enquiry’ (Carr and Kemmis, 1986: 162) by participants in particular social situations and classrooms. It recognises the importance of practitioners to the research process and attempts to improve pedagogical practices in the locations and circumstances where they are enacted (Altheide and Johnson, 2011; Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Gilmore and McDermott, 2006; Kemmis and McTaggart, 2000; Levin and Greenwood, 2011). It comprises cycles of research, action and reflection conducted by practitioners on their own practices. Importantly, consideration is made of the effects and consequences of action on students as well as their learning (Basit, 2010). Data presented in this paper is drawn from a case study incorporating practitioner action research, and accompanying reflection-on-action, by Kate, a physical education and dance teacher, in professional dialogue with the authors, as critical friends. Contact was established with Kate through her schools’ involvement in a broader research programme investigating the implementation of the AC with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Kate had offered up her project investigating the delivery of dance within AC: Health and Physical Education (AC: HPE), and was accepted, as one of two participants selected.

This case study was an exploration of ‘action’ in the form of redesigned pedagogies and ‘research’ in the form of teacher reflections on the actions and subsequent meaning making. In order to capture the experiences and knowledge generated by Kate and her students, unstructured and semi-structured interviews as ‘extended conversations’ (Holland and Ramazanoglu, 1995) were conducted on a regular basis over a nine-month period. Reflection is central to the action research process (Goodyear et al., 2013; Smyth, 2001). In building on the work of Schon (1983), Smyth (2001) proposes a number of questions to guide reflection and action. These include: ‘What do I do?’ (describe); ‘What does this mean?’ (inform); ‘How did it come to be like this?’ (confront); and ‘How might I do things differently?’ (reconstruct). In this situation Smyth’s questions provided guidance for Kate in identifying and clarifying issues, contributing factors and possible change in the form of pedagogical redesign. Specifically, Kate identified issues around a lack of engagement and reluctance of primary school boys (10–11 years old) to become involved in dance activities as well as an attachment to strict and traditional gender stereotypes. She indicated:

So for me it was about my students’ and their families’ attitudes towards dance. I tried to speak to one parent about his son’s engagement in dance he…swore about it, said his son didn’t need to do: that girlie stuff…if that’s the way the parents are thinking then that’s the way the kids are going to be thinking about it.

Kate attributed this to a particular working class demographic and masculine stereotype that had a general resistance to anything considered feminine. She stated that her students ‘didn’t have access to or the desire to learn dance’ and this was something that was ‘definitely worth challenging’. She felt that engagement in dance was important and apart from obvious health and social benefits she saw dance as useful in:

Getting them to engage with each other, engaging with different cultures and expanding ideas about what it is to be male…I think that if they can embrace this and see that it’s a good thing then, they might look forward to embracing other things at school.

Kate set further goals regarding gender:

I wanted to open their minds…their concept of gender and what is boy and girl, so you can’t go in with the mind-set that gender is set and there is nothing we can do about it, because if we did do nothing, then nothing would change.

In response to the question ‘What do I do?’ Kate described her dependence on a dance studio pedagogical model to deliver dance at the school:

…before I started being a school teacher, I was a classical ballet teacher, so my mentality of how to teach dance was very much: ‘I’m the expert and you should learn from me. You do exactly as you are told and you stand in a very particular way’. I went in straightaway trying to teach huge chunks of choreography…rather than trying to engage them with the concept of dance and letting them learn to love it first.

Rather than adopting a deficit view towards her students, Kate acknowledged that her pedagogies were not helping students move beyond traditional performances and representations of gender. The question ‘What does this mean?’ prompted Kate to identify that, because her students were passive and reluctant participants, they were not owning their learning nor connecting dance to their own interests and life-worlds. From this position Kate suggested that ‘it had come to be like this’ because of her reliance on traditional, teacher-directed, pedagogical practices that emphasised and prioritised particular bodies (flexible) and particular movements (stylised) while excluding most of her students and particularly her boys. Consideration of Kate’s own, gendered subjectivity is implicit here. As a young, female teacher, teaching dance, Kate reinforced traditional representations of gendered subjectivity. Her background in ballet as a dance form further reinforced the gendered embodiment of dance as girls’ activity and a movement form that privileged qualities of grace and control, which was at odds with male subjectivities around demonstrations of strength and power. However, Kate knew that she could do better. The final question suggested by Smyth (2001), ‘How might I do things differently?’ led Kate to consider broader pedagogical practices and develop the following guiding research question: ‘How can dance be taught within physical education in ways that engage boys and challenge traditional constructions of gender?’

As a case study approach supports the production of detailed accounts and deeper considerations of actions, experiences and perceptions (Basit, 2010), an interpretative lens was adopted in order to identify patterns, insights and understandings (Patton, 2002). The analytical process took the form of reading and re-reading textual accounts of interviews and coding for redesigned pedagogical ‘actions’ as well as Kate’s perceived responses to these actions. In establishing a dialectical relationship between the data and theoretical perspectives, a second layer of analysis entailed coding for ways that Kate connected with student life-worlds, developed supportive learning environments and challenged traditional gendered practices. The resulting themes took the form of ‘actions’ that hooked boys into dance, developed different relationships with learners and offered students broadened ways to perform their gender.

In presenting findings from this unique and particular context, we do not make claims for empirically generalisable findings, but present findings as a means to expand understandings and generate resonances that extend beyond the contextual specificity of this case (Gilmore and McDermott, 2006; Mason, 2002). In the next section we introduce the case study via a description of Kate’s pedagogical redesign, processes and reflection, and present data through the themes of building supportive environments for boys, connecting to their worlds, and taking risks.

Powerful pedagogies in dance

As a starting point Kate offered her students multiple opportunities to record their thoughts, feelings, experiences, perspectives and knowledge about dance:

We did…mind maps and word walls and picture association activities…then I really got a really good idea of where I thought they were at and how their feelings towards dance stood…from there I went: ‘OK, well I now need to start engaging them in some positive dance experiences to get them on side’.

Statements made by students like ‘dance sucks’, ‘too embarrassing’, ‘I hate it’, ‘it’s boring’, ‘hate’ and ‘don’t make me do it’ confirmed her existing feelings and also indicated the depths of discomfort, dislike and aversion that some boys had to dance. However, the strategy also threw up surprises with words like ‘cool’ as being associated with dance, albeit written in tiny font and upside down. This reminded Kate of the non-homogeneity of her student population. Kate’s practices can be understood in terms of allowing students to share their perspectives, be heard and valued, as well as guiding ideas for her redesigned pedagogy. These perspectives were important for Kate if she was to devise learning experiences that might engage students, provide meaningful opportunities to participate and overcome barriers to learning.

Another strategy used was a picture association activity where students associated different words with different types and forms of dance. For Kate this was a significant point of differentiation where her students associated words like ‘boring’ and ‘I never want to do it’ with forms like ballet. On the other hand, words associated with hip hop including ‘I don’t mind it’ and ‘I wanna do this’ gave the first signs of positivity associated with dance. For Kate this was significant:

I knew from this exercise that I would start with hip hop as many of the students didn’t have the same pre-conceived ideas around this style of dance…they were curious…and then I would slowly guide them toward other styles.

Hooks into dance

On the basis of the collection of her data Kate redesigned a number of specific contextualised pedagogical strategies that included asking male middle and senior schools students to peer-teach dance to her class of boys as well as arranging a performance by a male dance group from another high school:

I saw that a lot of my boys’ negative attitudes and opinions towards dance were stemming from their older role models, so my idea was to give them older role models that did embrace dance…

One older student, Larry, in particular played a vital role in challenging positions around dance for Kate’s grade five boys. Larry was involved in his own hip hop crew outside school and worked with the boys using some of his choreography and sharing his ideas of hip hop as a dance form. Importantly for Kate, Larry was self-taught:

He has his own hip hop crew outside of school as well, but he’s self-taught too, so he’s not come from a studio or had a teacher, he’s developed these skills all by himself. So I think that’s probably the most impressive thing…and something that my boys really engaged with…they can do it themselves.

Kate’s actions resonate with Scherpf’s (2006) use of hip hop as popular cultural expression through which students could centralise their own experiences and develop an embodied expression of their youth identity. Larry’s impact was broad and included efforts to imitate his moves. Whilst needing to intervene at times when moves required skills beyond their capacity, Kate recognised the significance of his presence in terms of extending gender boundaries for boys when she indicated: ‘It’s…being able to see someone who they perceive as being cool…dancing… and he’s seen as someone really important’.

In working to extend her students’ skills further, Kate asked her own boys’ class to be role models for younger students:

It’s one thing to see these older boys that, you know, are really into dance and are really good, but then they sort of become a bit disheartened that they’re not as good as them. So by then introducing students even younger than them it gave them a chance to be the older people that were really good, and others could be impressed by them.

Kate progressed student learning through small group tasks that combined teacher-directed and student-directed and -created dance. These were regularly videoed and reflected upon. Along the way, Kate found that the use of props was particularly powerful in reducing student anxiety. Possibilities exist that props took focus away from bodies and skills and allowed students to enjoy dancing as well as extending themselves to a greater extent. Kate identified masks as particularly useful: ‘It was disguising themselves…they got to be someone different, so they could sort of let those inhibitions go and be this person [who] might really love dance’.

Other props included sporting equipment. In particular, Kate asked her students to create short movement sequences to music using balls. We interpret Kate’s pedagogical actions as aligning with those of productive pedagogies (Keddie, 2006) in making connections to student life-worlds and providing safe and supportive learning environments. Kate was making connections to things they knew, liked and felt comfortable with:

I knew how much they loved sport, so one of the early activities I gave them a basketball, and a few simple steps…and then I sent them away and they had to work out on their own, finding different ways we could use the basketball to be part of dance.

In connecting further with her students’ life-worlds, Kate utilised a range of ‘dance apps’ that could be easily downloaded onto phones and tablets. This further supported students in tasks around combining their own movements into sequences. One particular app required only four simple body actions that were then automatically put to music and presented ‘professionally’. Kate felt that this was particularly successful with students who felt they lacked skills to dance:

…that was a really good one for my boys that were still really like: ‘Oh, I don’t know how to dance’. I just took them, took four small videos of them doing a simple movement, and it just automatically put it to music, and I said: ‘Look, you’re dancing, straight away on that screen, you’re dancing’.

After ‘hooking’ her students with these apps Kate communicated that she felt able to extend her students learning in surprisingly broad ways. Her students took it upon themselves to find their own music and other, more sophisticated, apps. When she realised this was happening Kate supported her students doing their own investigations but focussed their searches with strict guidelines around appropriateness and content of music. Our interpretations of these conversations with Kate suggest that her students might also be developing skills in critical literacy. Consequently, multiple outcomes became apparent to us in hearing of the rich learning tasks that were encompassing dance, performance, technology and critical literacy:

The app has all these really cool effects, so they had to choose, you know, like there’s a part in the song that says: ‘You’re going to fake it’, so then they used a fake snow…They were getting really into it, and actually thinking about it, they were matching their moves.

Different relationships and different experts

Our reading of Kate’s redesigned pedagogy is that it involved an altered relationship with students. Whilst establishing guidelines and expectations, it seemed to us that she shifted the position of power in the classroom from herself to her students. She stopped being the expert and ‘source of ideas’. Instead she ‘opened up’ and began to ‘learn’ from her students in ways that surprised her:

I think the biggest thing that changed…in the way I teach dance was working…really opening up and learning…from them, letting them take charge of choreography, and coming up with ideas and music.

Here, we suggest that Kate’s redesigned pedagogy aligns with Stinson (2008) in terms of providing opportunities for creative works, and enabling students to become makers of a curriculum where their knowledge and choices are central rather than excluded (Freire, 1993; Scherpf, 2006). As a result of these changes Kate communicated that her students were a lot more engaged in learning and ‘owned’ their dance products. She also indicated that they were starting to take dance into their homes and broader lives:

They were more engaged. They were more excited about being there.…Not just when I was there, but they were engaging with it at home to come up with the ideas themselves.

As a relatively new teacher in the profession (within five years of exiting university), Kate expressed fears and concerns about sharing control with her students. She worried about being seen to ‘lose control’ of her students:

To give them control was very difficult because…you think as a teacher you have to have some level of control…Do they now just see me as someone they could walk over? But I had to make an effort,…to try something.

While Zembylas and McGlynn (2012) talk of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ that enhance learning experiences for students, the same can be said for teachers who take risks and experience forms of discomfort in their search for transformative possibilities. We suggest that in attempting to co-construct a curriculum with her students Kate was breaking down power imbalances and broadening the boys’ enactments of masculinity through legitimising an alternative to a dominance model (Lingard and Douglas, 1999). We believe that she did not necessarily lose control. Rather, with students who were often understood to be ‘underachievers’ she seemed to gain trust, a higher level of engagement and responsibility for learning:

I didn’t end up losing…control over them, I felt we just became like co-workers almost…like I was there to still drive the lessons and get them moving in particular ways…but they were contributing just as much as me…. Yeah, on yard duty students would come up to me and say: ‘I’ve been listening to this song, have you heard this one?’

A chance to perform and re-do gender

After ‘hooking’ her boys into dance through various strategies that worked to connect dance with their life-worlds and interests, Kate communicated her desire to develop her students’ actual skills in dance, understanding of dance terminology and use of choreographic devices:

So it wasn’t just a concept of like: ‘Here’s a basketball, go off and make up anything’…‘I want you to be using the basketball with something that then uses your legs, your head, or in a particular way, or to a number of counts’. So we were introducing terminology and different concepts…unison, or…cannon.

Some dance concepts introduced were quite sophisticated but, according to Kate’s perspective, her students’ engagement and focus allowed such rigor of learning to be developed as well as the boys’ gendered movement repertoire to be extended:

…concepts of dance that you often wouldn’t be using until you were quite far advanced, that then could be moved away where we don’t have the basketballs anymore.

This was where Kate attempted to challenge traditional movement orientations around ‘fast and hard’ and allow her students access to other forms of physicality. However, she suggested that this happened with very little guidance:

But it’s surprising that you don’t almost have to ask, because at some point they do start experimenting with different ways of moving. And a lot of the boys started mimicking the gymnastics use of balls…rolling it in those sorts of ways across their arms.…Which was really quite graceful…they came to those sorts of outcomes themselves.

Here the students could be seen as expanding expectations of what it means to be male and deconstructing dichotomies around gender (Keddie, 2006; Scholes and Nagel, 2012). They were exploring their own popular culture around sport and music and broadening their understandings of gender to include dance:

The biggest thing for me was watching the way they danced to the different speeds and tempos. So when the song did slow down, the boys’ movements slowed.…They made it change, the way they moved.

Other ways of extending outcomes and demanding rigor in learning occur through providing opportunities to perform dance. In challenging deficit views of her students, Kate told us that she was not interested in reproducing ‘easy dance’ or doing ‘low-level stuff’. She felt that: ‘You have to push…you’re demanding…intellectual work…they’ve got a sequence, they’ve got an order and now performance is important’.

Kate felt strongly that performance opportunities needed to be ‘scaffolded’. She began with small and less intimidating performance opportunities, to herself, to partners and to groups, before challenging students with larger events. Again, Kate’s actions could be seen in terms of productive pedagogies by providing supportive environments as well as rich tasks to further outcomes (Keddie, 2006).

I didn’t force any students to perform if they were uncomfortable.…I would view them first. We then stepped up to having a group watch another group, and then we got to a point where they were more than comfortable to perform for our class…now, we’ve got the talent competition going on…so they will be performing in front of a huge crowd…

In performance a student can put themselves at risk of being ridiculed by peers. This can be painful and work against open engagement in dance by boys. For these reasons, the response to the performance of others was highly significant in the scaffolding process:

We’d come up with very clear expectations about what is OK to say, how we can respond to people in a positive way rather than a negative way…we used the Two Stars and a Wish, so they have to give two positive things, and the wish…that they would do something better.

Gauging the changes

As the unit progressed Kate collected data to provide an indication of the impact of her pedagogical redesign. For instance, she repeated word wall exercises regarding knowledge and feelings about dance. Words including ‘cool’, ‘energetic’, ‘fabulous’, ‘good’ and ‘fun’ written by the boys in relation to dance gave an indication of the changes in knowledge and perspective that transpired. Kate commented: ‘When we revisited the word walls, and you could automatically see the style of language has changed, they’ve started using positive words around dance’. Conversations with students also indicated to her an increased engagement and interest in dance: Interviewer:

So you weren’t getting that ‘Don’t make me do it’ stuff?

Kate:

No, not at all anymore, and it was like: ‘Oh, that’s really cool’, and then they would say things like: ‘Oh, we could use a step or a dance piece like that when we do this next’, or, ‘We want to try doing that’.

Boys can be powerful controllers of each other and of gendered behaviour. They can easily ‘shut each other down’ with small innuendo or whispered comments. Early on Kate’s students would control each other in relation to dance:

So like early on there were one or two boys that were not writing negative things, but I saw very quickly they stopped writing anything, because the other boys were commenting, or under their breath were saying things, just shutting them down, like pretty much: ‘You’re not cool if you’re writing that’. By the end of it no one was shutting each other down. They weren’t afraid anymore to say something positive about dance.

For Kate though, the biggest change was in the boys ‘readiness’ to dance, their engagement with lessons and the fact that on occasions they did not want to leave:

To me the biggest thing was just the way the kids came into my lessons. They didn’t want to leave the lessons, they wanted to finish the exercise they were doing, they wanted to get there early, they wanted to be a part of it, they wanted to talk to me about it outside of school.

Kate felt the boys were demanding independence and control over their learning: ‘They weren’t doing it because I told them to, they were doing it because they felt it was important, and they wanted to do it’. The classroom teacher also noticed changes in this group of boys in terms of them wanting more control over other schooling activities:

Their teacher has also seen the change. She’s…doing a piece for the Christmas concert…and their attitudes and ideas with wanting to be involved, has really changed…. she’s obviously done a Christmas concert item every year…and probably very much like I did: ‘Here’s what we’re doing, learn it and do it’, but now the kids are coming to her: ‘Could we do this? Can we do it this way?’

Our reading suggests that performance opportunities were valuable in a number of ways. They raised confidence, self-esteem and a sense of achievement for participants. Butler’s (2004) work is also helpful in appreciating that dance lessons can be spaces where students’ performances of gender are informed by hegemonic norms that limit notions of feminine and masculine physicality. The reception of these performances is equally as significant as the performances (Butler, 2004). Performance opportunities provided by Kate provided a space for a different repetition of acts, and communicated to the school and wider community a different sort of identity for boys who had previously been positioned as deficit. It was also valuable for other teachers to see some students in a different way:

They [other teachers] figure: ‘He’s just that kid that’s always in trouble’ and then they think: ‘There’s that kid doing something really positive and he looks so happy’. So it was really nice for them to get to see the students in a different light, and see what they are capable of.

For Kate small change was powerful:

There definitely is transformation, and at the moment it’s very small because we’ve, I’ve only worked with 30 of 400 kids, so we’ve started small, but what I’ve seen.…They’re engaged in it, and they’re thinking in a different way, and I’m hoping that they’re seeing and thinking: ‘Well that [dance] wasn’t so bad, maybe I’ll try something else, and…I’ll like that just as much’. It’s opened their minds to just trying something new, whether it be dance or something else.

What we learned about pedagogy, dance, boys and possibilities

In this paper we have drawn attention to pedagogical practices of dance in one school. Specifically, we have focused on a case study of pedagogical redesign by a teacher of dance at a school in the northern suburbs of Adelaide (South Australia). As this is an area of high social and economic disadvantage the study was designed to investigate pedagogical practices that enhance outcomes and engagement by boys.

The work is informed by theories and literature around gender and embodied pedagogies, which draw attention to the construction of gender as well as embodied ways of knowing (Wilcox, 2009). In operating from an understanding of pedagogy as the complex practices that encompass relationships between teachers, students, curriculum, context and knowledge created, we were interested in the pedagogies of dance, including their focus and historical use of didactic teaching approaches.

The project took the form of participatory action research, which recognises the centrality of practitioners to the research process and seeks to improve pedagogical practices as well as social justice implications. In following Schon (1983) and Smyth (2001) we are also aware of reflection ‘in’ action as well as ‘on’ action being crucial to practitioner inquiry. Therefore this case study investigated an enactment of redesigned pedagogical practices, subsequent outcomes and meanings made.

Analysis of Kate’s reflections and conversations worked to identify themes and insights from her pedagogical redesign. As a starting point Kate identified a lack of engagement with dance by her male students in grade five. She felt they were passive participants who reluctantly engaged with dance and complied ‘because they had to’. Kate felt this was a ‘pedagogy problem’ as much as anything and was associated with her reliance on ‘traditional’ dance teaching practices. Her goal was to increase her male students’ engagement, enjoyment and confidence to engage with dance so as to benefit from its outcomes and to broaden gendered understandings around multiple forms of physicality.

Kate’s pedagogical redesign took the form of providing multiple hooks for boys into dance. Hip hop as a dance genre was seen as a ‘way in’ for working with boys as it was identified as a form that seemed most conducive to her male students. Kate designed learning tasks that also involved the use of technology, thus connecting further with students’ life-worlds. In line with productive pedagogies that advocate for rigor in learning tasks (Lingard et al., 2003) Kate developed tasks that were rich and multi-dimensional. She communicated her intent to stimulate a sense of curiosity for students to find appropriate music and movements while engaging with the technology and producing a dance product. Her strategies also changed the teacher–learner relationship with her students. She relinquished her role as the expert and creator of dance in order to allow her students greater control over their learning and creation of the dance to be performed. Other strategies involved the use of male role models from other schools as well as senior students in the school site.

In drawing on Kate’s reflections we feel this layering approach possibly merged strategies to not only engage boys, but also to take them outside forms of movement identified and associated with traditional forms of masculinity. Being taken physically and socially outside of our comfort zones can function as a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ but when initiated by the boys themselves and accomplished in a supportive environment possibly allowed the boys to ‘enjoy’ the process of moving differently (Zembylas and McGlynn, 2012). Our interpretations suggest that Kate’s ‘guiding’ rather than ‘being the expert’ approach may also have invited students to take the tasks into their own worlds and communities. In reflecting on her redesigned pedagogies and on-going commitment to these strategies Kate commented on just how much her students surprised her:

Well it just shows me how much they can bring themselves, that I don’t have to bring everything to the lesson. I can bring an idea and a concept…and then they can take it in a direction that suits them, and they can surprise me, and things that they bring to the lesson can totally change where I was going to go next.

While this case study was limited by the small sample of students and a single teacher, it does not claim to provide generalisations that are representative of all students and teachers. However, Kate’s pedagogical redesign provides some evidence of the potential of connecting to student life-worlds, providing rigor, and altering the teacher-student learning relationship to support success and open up the possibilities for dance and boys. The work also invites investigation of the range of alternative movement practices that could be incorporated into physical education in attempts to challenge prevailing gendered norms and ultimately transform school physical education by expanding the range of movement forms through which young people can express themselves physically.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

Support for this research was provided through a University of South Australia Divisional Research Performance Fund grant.

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