Teaching Dancers to Think Historically: Multidisciplinarity in Dance History Pedagogy

Abstract

The turn toward methodology and practice in higher education provides new incentive to reshape our pedagogical approaches. This presentation will advocate for teaching historical methods—specifically archival research and primary source analysis—in undergraduate dance history courses. While I argue that this approach has distinct pedagogical benefits, it also makes evident the disparity between asking students to think like dancers and asking them to think like historians and highlights the multidisciplinary nature of dance history.