| dc.description.abstract | Exploring the nexus between dance education and dance science, this thesis comprises a feminist interpretive ethnographic investigation of the implementation of periodisation in a British vocational dance Higher Education Institution. Periodisation is a physical training planning approach, aiming to promote dancer well-being and performance, whilst avoiding overtraining and injury. However, the integration of research into practice, including that related to periodisation, is notoriously challenging.
With an interest in the subjectivities of those involved in vocational dance education, and how they translate periodisation into practice, the research aims include: exploring the nature of periodisation in tertiary vocational dance education through first-year undergraduate students’, teachers’, artists’, and managers’ experiences; gaining insight into periodisation’s pedagogical contributions; and understanding how participants ascribe value to periodisation during educational change. Positioning the body as an epistemological site, multi-modal data gathering methods explored how participants made meaning of periodisation.
Three main findings were constructed. Firstly, participants proposed periodisation as a complicated, ambiguous phenomenon, understood through holistic, heterogeneous experiences of load which span physical and non-physical domains within and beyond dance education. Secondly, participants interpreted periodisation for themselves, ‘thinking-with-periodisation’ to rationalise curricular decision-making in advance, and studio-based pedagogies in hindsight. In the studio, periodisation focussed on movement intensity, influenced pedagogically by students and the teacher through relational shifts in power. Supporting sensory refinement has the potential to move students’ responsibility for periodisation from the other to the self. Thirdly, findings offer insight into dance science implementation and the mixed opinions participants had of periodisation’s relevance for vocational dance education. Emphasis was placed on the importance of fostering dialogue and attending to context, in bridging the gaps between practice and research.
The significance of this study lies in how it illuminates participants’ socially constructed, embodied knowledge of periodisation, to explain how those tasked with its implementation in vocational dance education make meaning of it for themselves. In so doing, the study extends what is known about periodisation through the inclusion of dance students’, teachers’, artists’, and managers’ experiences and understanding of it. | en_GB |
