Decolonizing Tertiary Dance Education Through Including Student Voices in a Curricula Change Project

• This chapter explores how student engagement and decolonizing curriculum design can be connected through an ambition to destabilize unequal power relations, invitations to democratize knowledge, and efforts to make marginalized narratives central in change processes in tertiary dance education in Sweden. Although student influence in tertiary education in Sweden is a legislated right, members of the project group working to decolonize and restructure the Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Dance Pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts discovered a lack of dialogue with students in the department. This discovery motivated the development of a participatory action research project aimed at engaging student voices in the process of changing the curriculum. The author team, consisting of two teachers and one BA student, designed and carried out a workshop series. In this chapter, the efforts to create space for active student engagement are described and analyzed, the different perspectives added through student voices are explored, and issues of voice and ethics are actively integrated and contextualized.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Scenkonst (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Performing Arts (hsv//eng)

Keyword

change project

student participation

decolonization

tertiary dance education

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)