Traditional White Spaces

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why haven’t students been expected and required to study curricula beyond the Eurocentric perspective? This paper argues for equitable inclusion and representation in curricula and pedagogical practices for the discipline of dance in higher education and explicates why it matters to the discipline’s collective identity. Subsequently, this argument suggests that the racial formation in the history of America’s education system, including dance education, from the early 1900s through the mid-1930s, is a direct result of its ongoing monocultural and ethnocentric paradigm. Understanding how race has contributed to dance’s history and development as a discipline in the academy could offer a resolute path toward a paradigm shift away from its historically ethnocentric model. Faced with debates about essentialist nationalism versus broader enterculturalism, my historiography of dance in higher education intends to offer a critical approach to revisioning strategies necessitating more culturally relevant pedagogy.