Creativity and Dance Education Research

Abstract

Research into Creativity and Dance Education is increasingly in the spotlight as, internationally, the community of dance education researchers is growing. In recent years, the field has blossomed to include new cultural perspectives, voices and styles and a consistently expanding range of definitions, epistemologies and methodologies for researching the inter-relationship between ‘dance’, ‘education’ and ‘creativity’. In this chapter, we build on existing scholarship by first offering a historical perspective, moving to critically and thematically consider recent developments, and then to look ahead. This includes exploring definitions of creativity which focus on cognition through to socio-cultural perspectives and the post-human turn. The chapter also critically considers how facilitation of creativity has been researched, including performativity and creativity pedagogic tensions, incorporation of technology and inclusion within teacher training, alongside a shift towards articulating creative and cultural dance practices themselves as key to understanding and developing creative pedagogy in dance. The chapter then considers the range of methodologies that have been employed to research creativity in dance education and future possibilities in this area. Next steps in research conclude the chapter with a focus on future influences from the ever-developing field of dance studies and its articulations of choreography and practice; from research into cultural and indigenous dance and emerging new multicultural ideas about creativity; from applications of advances in psychology and technological methods within Dance Science; and from the Post-Human turn in educational research shifting us towards more emergent re-organisations of how we think about and practice creativity in dance education.