I FELT: SELF, MOVEMENT, PARTNER, GROUP: A STUDY OF INTERSUBJECTIVE CONNECTION IN COMMUNITY- ENGAGED DANCE EDUCATION

Abstract

This dissertation research examines students’ lived experiences of dance improvisation in a 2014 Hampshire College course titled “Community Crossovers: Dance in the Community” taught by the author. Research methodology is informed by the hermeneutic phenomenology of educational philosopher Max van Manen, dance education research grounded in phenomenological methods by Karen Bond and Susan W. Stinson, among others, and researchers and writers of classroom action research. Sources of qualitative data include students’ reflective writings about their experiences of three selected dance improvisations—Human Puzzle, Mirror, and Approach/Avoid—in both college and community settings. Additional sources contextualizing students’ experiential meanings include course entry questionnaires, videotaped college and community dance sessions, written pedagogical and phenomenological reflections of both the researcher and a teaching assistant, and class discussions. Our Massachusetts community partners were the Treehouse Foundation, Easthampton and the Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Children’s Action Corps, South Hadley. Student lived experience writings were coded over several cycles to identify categories of meaning in each of the three improvisations at both college and community sites, and these were analyzed for themes across four modes of student participation: self, partner, group and movement (an aesthetic mode). Findings revealed bodily-affective-social-aesthetic meaning making that foregrounds relationality, or connection, through embodied experiences. Students’ descriptions of connection can be understood as qualitatively distinct kinds of felt intersubjectivity: two-person, merged, and other-first. Findings are placed in conversation with literature from dance, community-based education, philosophy, and critical pedagogy.