Understanding Dance Through Authentic Choreographic and A/r/tographic Experiences

In Arts education, and specifically for Dance, the challenge for tertiary educators is to provide authentic, artful experiences with the aim of developing teachers capable of delivering authentic Dance curriculum. The limited time allocated to the Arts necessitates strategic focus on the design of the unit and the development of engaging artistic assessment tasks. Codifying learning activities around choreographic practice provides students with access irrespective of prior learning and offers robust Arts-based experiences. The questions emerging from the research are as follows: 1. How does the unit organisation enhance students’ artistic learning? 2. How does offering authentic choreographic experiences and assessment enhance students’ appreciation of Dance as an Art form? 3. How could these choreographic experiences better prepare students for their future role as generalist teachers? This chapter describes a pilot study that explored students’ understanding of Dance and how their artistic assessable tasks enabled them as artists, researchers and teachers