Everyone remembers that teacher.
The one who ignited their beliefs, or inspired them to keep dancing, or collapsed their joy with a comment or correction or opinion. If you’ve danced long enough, you’re well acquainted with both the penultimate power a teacher can wield and its repercussions.
But what if there was another way—a healthier way—to experience dance education?
Care-full Creativity in Theatre and Dance Education, by movement artist and educator Nicole Perry, is an interactive, reflective text that provides educators with pedagogy to dismantle hierarchies of power in the classroom setting, reinforced by ideas for embodied practice with students.
In a specific call-to-action, Care-full Creativity asks readers to consider alternatives to classroom practices that situate teachers as bestowers of knowledge and students as empty minds waiting to be filled. Embedded within the idea that students are being “empowered” by an education is the idea that students arrive at class powerless. Perry asserts that power structures are inherent to classrooms but she doesn’t believe that those power structures have to work one way. Throughout Care-full Creativity she probes the nature of power: Who has it? How is it perceived? Can it be manipulated? Transferred? How?
Perry details how she supports college students in accessing their freedom of choice, bodily autonomy, and self-knowledge by locating the power within themselves. By encouraging her students to trust their own needs, Perry helps create a classroom culture where students can safely “take risks and explore sensitive or difficult material.’ Thus, Care-full pedagogy becomes “the perfect antidote for abuse of power.”
Because Care-full Creativity problematizes some traditional dance pedagogies, it may be a challenging text for long-time educators, especially those who have taught for decades without examining and evolving their own practice. If someone’s understandings of power, authority, and respect have been shaped by past generations of teachers and mentors, it can be difficult to recognize, reckon with, and break a harmful cycle. When does this work happen? During professional development workshops with colleagues? Slowly, over a semester break? I’m curious if the work occurs best as a solo reflection or when supported by an institution.
Following each chapter, Perry provides vulnerable sections for reflection, in the form of journal pages, so that this work has a place to happen. With questions such as “How and/or why have I used power dynamics to shape my pedagogy?” and “Where can my language encourage questions or demonstrate my own willingness to be wrong?” Perry gives readers a space to ponder these challenging ideas; one where “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer. These reflections may unearth painful memories—as a young student, a competitive teenager, a doe-eyed college freshman, or a nearly-retired dance studio owner. No one is exempt from examining their perceived power, or lack thereof, because “[w]hen systems of power are in place, students exist in a space not to learn, but to please or impress the person in power.”
Sitting with that.
Can you remember? That time you pushed hard (too hard) in a movement class, just for external validation? That time you needed a break, had a question, endured pain, sensed a ‘wrongness,’ and you didn’t speak? Maybe ignoring an injury for a bit of praise or a higher grade?
If you’ve been there, either as a student or as a teacher encouraging these behaviors, Perry encourages grace. We can always change. All educators are imperfect. Perry urges the reader to remember that “dialogue is inherently disruptive to power.” To care, about yourself or others, is to speak up. To know this as a young dancer, or as a seasoned educator, could be transformative.
Using her white, female, thin, able-bodied, middle-aged self as an example, Perry reflects that, “students’ perceptions of me influence our shared reality.” From this awareness, she has shifted her teaching practice, using methods such as ungrading and all forms of physical contact being consent-based. Care-full Creativity serves as an outline of how she has bridged trauma-informed theory with practice and psychologically safe examples with reflections.
I’m struck by the intricate mechanisms of power Perry discusses—not just students-with-teachers, but classes-within-departments, departments-within-divisions, divisions-within-colleges. Power is everywhere, and teachers are also navigating expected outputs for enrollments, finances, and marketability. If your Care-filled pedagogy is at odds with your colleagues and your institution, how do you function?
Additionally, if fear is built into an education framework, how does learning suffer? Perry believes “Fear not only inhibits safety, but it also inhibits consent. Students who fear displeasing their teacher [or teachers who fear displeasing an administrator][…]may acquiesce to their demands, whether or not those requests fit within their boundaries, because to violate their own boundaries and choices feel safer than to violate the relationship.”
Sitting with this as well.
All of Perry’s ideas are rooted in practice. In the second half of the text, she offers easy linguistic changes, as simple as extracting the possessive pronouns (e.g. “the dancers” instead of “my dancers, my students”) or using all-gender identifiers such as “dancers,” “folks,” and “you all,” instead of “ladies” or “you guys.” Instead of saying “Do you have any questions?,” try “What questions do you have?.” When someone’s been teaching for forty years, shifting language may take time, but Perry assures readers that the effort is worth it.
Speaking of language: the syllabus. Perry places a lot of weight on this ‘living document,’ which extends beyond just providing the framework for her courses by giving students opportunities to contribute to the course goals and expectations for the semester. As a fellow educator in university settings, I share Perry’s belief in using the syllabus to establish the importance of expectations and class culture from day one; I would be interested to hear how she navigates the add/drop period (where students have the ability to join a class after the syllabus is discussed), and how that shifts the class dynamics.
Once the syllabus is set and learning begins, Perry continues to provide emotionally considerate expectations about the semester for her students. During class, Perry encourages a self-guided, two minute somatic check-in at the beginning of each class, which gives students time to bring their energy ‘up’ or ‘down,’ while also providing a grace period for latecomers. That kind of self-inquiry and commitment, I imagine, is received gratefully by college-aged students.
At times, this book feels like it bores into my own student experiences and memories as a young dancer. Indeed, care-full pedagogic practices stand “in opposition to many of the teaching methods and traditions of European-derived performances found in many classrooms”–ones where there are master teachers and classroom hierarchies that limit opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and self-reflection. In a psychologically safe, trauma-informed, consent forward classroom, students feel welcome to “ask questions, fail, express their needs, opinions, and ideas, work together, and challenge the status quo.” This classroom values growth over being right, support over competition, and creativity over perfection.
For anyone: if you ‘fail,’ you still belong.
I want to be in this classroom. Do you?
