Dancing as searching with Deleuze - a study of what students in physical education teacher education express and experience in creative dance lessons

Physical education (PE), and specifically the teaching area of dance, has been identified as an important pedagogical setting within which young people develop creativity. Creativity is thus an important aspect of schooling. Several studies have suggested however, that dance is seldom taught in PE in ways that acknowledge creative aspects of movement learning, and that students in physical education teacher education (PETE) receive insufficient training in the area of dance. Very little research has been conducted specifically on how teachers and PETE students understand the subject tradition of creative dance. The aim of this paper is to create insights into what PETE students express and experience in creative dance lessons where we specifically explore a pedagogy based on imitation. To address this aim, empirical material was generated through observations and logbooks during a pedagogical sequence of creative dance at a Swedish PETE institution. Deleuzian concepts of palpation and experimentation were used to guide our analysis. The results of this study show alternative ways of understanding what can happen when students participate in creative dance lessons. Our findings contribute to researchers' and teacher educators' understandings of students' experiences of working with spaces of creativity in PETE, and how these experiences can be used in teaching of creative dance