Abstract
Latin Dance Party refers to a tertiary cultural dance unit in Brisbane, Australia, that combines technical/social Latin American dance with cultural perspectives. This article explores the recommendations from two research projects carried out in this unit, over two years, to investigate team-building and cultural authenticity within teaching and learning pedagogies. As a result of these recommendations, the researchers have explored approaches that enhance teacher-student relationships, the development of online contextual resources, and reflective teaching and learning strategies. These approaches have implications for future research into the integration of cultural contexts into dance teaching methodology in university settings.
Highlights
The teaching and learning contextAs a part of twenty-first century skill development, students need the ability to connect with a range of cultural contexts that create links for their future career paths (Barrett, Byram, Lázár, Mompoint-Gaillard, & Philippou, 2014)
Latin Dance Party refers to a tertiary cultural dance unit in Brisbane, Australia, that combines technical/social Latin American dance with cultural perspectives
While the teacher can implement a pedagogy and curriculum which is as “non-Eurocentric” (Pugh McCutcheon, 2006, p. 217) as possible, working with movement and perspectives which as closely as possible resemble those of the indigenous cultural context, they need to illustrate for the students that the source itself is usually hybrid, and possibly even heavily influenced by Western culture in the way that is enacted in the country of origin
Summary
As a part of twenty-first century skill development, students need the ability to connect with a range of cultural contexts that create links for their future career paths (Barrett, Byram, Lázár, Mompoint-Gaillard, & Philippou, 2014). To deepen students’ understandings of the cultural significance and applications of Latin American dance, there was a need to explore a more layered approach to pedagogy that reflected the transcultural communication of this dance technique (Pedro, 2017). The deeper knowledge of both the cultural context and the dance form requires a multi-layered approach to pedagogy that includes access to physical resources as well as deep knowledge about the dance and music of individual countries. Within this unit, the approach was transcultural in that the activities and the pedagogy involved the presence of Australian Latin American communities. While interculturalism focuses on contact “between cultures that are assumed to be discrete entities”, transculturalism interprets “all cultures to be inherently mixed” (Kraidy, 2005, p. 14)
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