This chapter, ‘Finding a place for responsiveness, possibility, and emergence in dance education assessment systems’, discusses futures for how dance is assessed in higher education settings. I question whether traditional ‘academic’ systems can truly reflect the creative, embodied, and experiential ways dancers learn. Too often, dance departments inherit assessment tools designed for non-arts subjects, like written tests or rigid grading systems, which fail to honor the intelligence of movement. I discuss the opportunity dance pedagogy has for devising unique assessment tools that meet dance’s needs. I also reflect on whether the field of dance can also offer principles and values for assessment that shift the paradigm of assessment in ways that might enrich assessment in other fields.
Drawing on my 25 years of teaching and examining in the UK, Canada, and the USA, I suggest strategies and frameworks for assessment that can nurture creativity, recognize embodied knowledge, and better reflect the lived experience of dance education.
The chapter is in the anthology Ethical Agility in Dance: Rethinking Technique in British Contemporary Dance, edited by Noyale Colin, Catherine Seago, and Kathryn Stamp. Routledge.
Citation: Akinleye, A. (2023). Finding a place for responsiveness, possibility and emergence in dance education assessment systems. In Noyale Colin, Catherine Seago, Kathryn Stamp (Ed.), Ethical Agility in Dance (pp. 68-80). Routledge.