Participants

In selecting participants for the inaugural co-lab, I was seeking to construct a group that brought a variety of perspectives to our work, including dance style specialization as well as diversity in terms of racial and gender identities. Three participants identified as male and two as female. Three participants identified as White, one as Black, and one as mixed race (Black/White/Native American/Hawaiian). We all had considerable experience dancing and teaching social dance, with years of teaching experience ranging from 2 years to 30 years. The high level of expertise in our chosen genres (including salsa, zouk, lindyhop, West Coast swing, blues, tango, fusion, and ballroom dance) and the lack of direct competition in the marketplace between participants enabled us to form a respectful, open, and generous environment of exchange. I was also able to pay everyone a stipend for their participation thanks to a generous grant from the Kreielsheimer Foundation.

Structure of the Group Co-Lab

Group Meetings: The group met bi-weekly for two hours each meeting. Due to starting before all members had been vaccinated from COVID-19, some meetings were conducted over zoom and others were in person. We tried three different structures.

1) Success or Challenge Point: One member of the group presented either a successful strategy they had implemented in their teaching or a challenge they were facing in their teaching. This presentation became the launching point for a lively discussion of the issue. Presenters were identified in advance and we spent approximately one hour on each topic.

2) Live Music Dialogue: for one session, we invited two musicians (Ben Thomas and Jeff Busch) who have extensive experience playing live music for social dances and for dance classes. Musicians brought their instruments, and we had a free flowing discussion (that included some playing, clapping, and dancing) between musicians and dancers about how to facilitate better knowledge of and interaction with music in our classes and communities.

3) Mini Teach-ins: Each teacher taught a 15-minute dance lesson to the other participants, followed by discussion about our experiences/observations.

Peer Observations: The members also committed to doing a peer observation of someone else in the group teaching a class. Teachers were encouraged to share notes in a simple format (what I observed, what I was inspired by, questions or points for discussion) and schedule a conversation with their peer afterwards. Due to COVID limitations, not all these were able to take place.

Findings

Topics that emerged in the group discussions were wide ranging, although many of them had to do with big picture issues related to shaping dance community and class structures rather than specifics of knowledge transfer in the classroom itself. We speculate that this was in part due to starting our work together over zoom, which encouraged more meta-discourse since we couldn’t actually stand up and demonstrate or try out dancing with each other. Topics that emerged included:

· Roles and gender, including language for naming roles

· How to make classes and dances more welcoming to dancers of a range of gender expressions and role preferences

· Incentives and marketing tools to get more leaders into classes and to encourage people to learn both roles

· How gendered expectations and sexism differentially impact the experience of male-presenting and female-presenting teachers

· Mentoring other teachers

· Consent

· Anti-racism and cultural appropriation

· Setting up classes to maximize student retention

· Musicality

· How teachers can shape the inclusiveness of community and prepare students to transition from class to social settings

· Structuring classes for beginners vs. more advanced students

· Specific social dance culture and history in different social dances

· Dance and masculinity in different cultures

A number of participants were inspired by specific exercises or strategies described by their peers and were able to apply them directly to their own teaching. For example, some tried new rhythm exercises, were inspired to use live music in their classes, or adopted specific language (like presenting learning the other role as an “opportunity to improve your dancing”). Many topics, like how to incentivize students to learn both roles, revealed how much context and student population impact our teaching approach. No one strategy will work for all classroom contexts (e.g. university class, nightclub drop-in lesson, 5-week studio progressive series) or student populations. For example, one teacher expressed that many male students were resistant to dancing with other men in their classes whereas another teacher said students in their classes were questioning the very construct of gender itself and had no hesitation dancing with partners of any gender identity. Such exchanges highlighted how the cultural values students brought into the classroom were essential to consider in our teaching approach.

The unanimous consensus of the group was that the most valuable aspect of the co-lab was the sense of community it engendered amongst the participants.

I feel like what I'm leaving with this this feeling of not being alone in the way that, you know, at the beginning, I felt really burnt out. And I still feel a little burnt out. But I feel much less knowing that, like other dance instructors are here and where we're all, we've all been facing all the different weird challenges that COVID gave us. And like knowing that I'm able to talk to you guys about stuff related to being a dance instructor has been really nice over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been really grateful for this. -Lila Faria

I think what I got more value out of was sharing with my colleagues my struggles. Being able to talk to people who are going through the same challenges that I’m going through….How many times do we get to sit with five-six different dance instructors, not necessarily from the same dance style, and just brainstorm about things and challenges. Not many times…So something organized like this can be very valuable, not just for experienced instructors but for newbies as well. Because they can get this amount of experience from other instructors as well in one place that is going to be very valuable. I think that's you know ‘cause challenges can very and ideas can vary, but the whole thing is just have the group collaborating and working together towards the same goal. -Reinier Valdes

At least one participant expressed a significant new crystallization of his teaching philosophy as a result of our work together.

It has affected my teaching a great deal. It's created more of a structure and more of an emphasis on the importance of the history and the culture …I feel that a lot of teachers just teach the dance and just the technique and they just teach the movement. And that's our product. But our business model, or what we're really infusing, is more of the culture. And that's, I think, is what for us it's more about teaching relationships and more how teaching people a lot of understanding interact with each other. Technique is very, very important and it allows you to express yourself more, but I think the heart of what we go into is about relationships between two people and the culture, between the community. And so my goal has changed a little bit when teaching classes. It's more about how can I get the group to interact in the group, how to communicate, as opposed to, they have to be the get understand that they step with the metatarsal…We create community and relationships. And our tool is dance. -Za Thomaier

The mini teach-in structure, which was the last format we tried due to COVID restrictions, was in some ways the most generative. We all agreed that 15-minutes was too short, and that future iterations of the group should start with 30-minute teach-ins by all members as a means of introduction. These lessons establish everyone as an expert in their own discipline while simultaneously allowing us to develop intimacy through the shared vulnerability of being beginners in each other’s genres. We were instantly able to admire some of the most effective teaching methods used by our peers, including use of imagery, vocalizations that mimic musical structures, gamification, and framing challenging physical sequences as cognitively simple. Many of us recognized connections and points of contrast between different dances that helped clarify the priorities of the dances we teach. For example, blues teacher Lila noticed that elements in the peer mini-lessons that were more challenging for her (like tension in the arms) are rarely used in blues dancing. Likewise, swing teacher Ben recognized a key difference between salsa and swing that could better help him work with students coming to him from a salsa background.

There are some contradictions that I noticed right away with the salsa. In lindy hop, you have continuous momentum as a default. Usually if you start in motion you're going to continue until there's a reason to change. And when I’m teaching salsa dancers to lindy hop, the follow always stops when they get to the leader and they don't keep going. And then in salsa I was doing the opposite, when I was trying to follow Juliet I would keep going. No, you can calm down the momentum. And the same thing with the direction of the hips in salsa is opposite because you don't commit all the weight every time to that third step. And in lindy hop you always commit all that weight as a default or in Charleston. So the hip leans in different directions, so when I tried to add the hips it was exactly opposite. It was totally wrong, so it's gonna take me some time to calibrate. –Ben White

In addition to the contrast clarifying essential features of the dances we specialize in, we were also able to recognize habits in others’ mini-lessons that helped us become more conscious of our own habits. For example, we noticed how easily our own biases and cultural history seeps into our language in a way that could have unintended effects. I am a female-presenting dancer who enjoys leading, and I noticed disappointment and defiance welling up when it appeared a teacher made an assumption that I would follow based on my gender. Even when my peer thought they were inviting everyone to do both roles, some subtle cues produced an environment that made me feel less welcome as a female-presenting lead. This experienced clarified how intentional I need to be with my own language and assumptions to create an inclusive environment for all students.