Abstract
This chapter discusses the development and testing of a new approach to teaching dance to girls who are on the cusp of becoming teenagers through a specially designed program called Work It Out. Pedagogically Work It Out accounts for the performative nature of gender (Butler, 1990), and the prevalence of ‘beauty sickness’ among adolescent girls addresses these issues through embodied play. In this program, dance is designed to guide girls through a self-reflexive practice where their ideas about body image are expressed. This teaching strategy applies the inherently expressive nature of creative dance and choreography to assist girls in conveying their experience of girlhood and how it is affected or related to their bodies and body image. The contributions of this program to education are discussed in relation to the dance curriculum in Ontario, Canada, and current offerings for body image programming in schools.
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Notes
- 1.
The all girl setting was at a private school. It is important to highlight this as being a private school the class size is smaller and the general social status of students is of a more affluent nature. Many of the girls had some background in dance or gymnastics as well. This would have added to their feeling of higher confidence.
- 2.
Daniel R. Gould explains confidence to be either dispositional or state where, ‘dispositional confidence’ relates to an individual’s general concept of their athletic ability and ‘state confidence’ is situational and based on experience performing in certain environments rendering high or low levels of personal confidence (Gould 57).
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Paolantonio, D. (2019). Playing with Pedagogy: Teaching Dance and Embracing Play as a Pedagogical Tool. In: Costes-Onishi, P. (eds) Artistic Thinking in the Schools. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8993-1_7
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