"A little kind of community"
South African students dance for self, other and society
pp. 383-400
in: Karen Bond (ed), Dance and the quality of life, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
South Africans dance! We dance to establish identity, build community, and to foster collective healing. This qualitative case study investigates meanings and locations of social cohesion in a South African dance teacher education setting. African philosophy, particularly notions of ubuntu, served as a theoretical framework to underpin meanings of cohesion in this study, which investigated pre-service student teachers' experiences and perceptions of a particular dance education course in a culturally and politically diverse university classroom in post-apartheid South Africa. Open-ended questionnaires, reflective journals, and focus group interviews were employed to generate data. Findings indicate that this dance education course provided interactive spaces for social cohesion in a culturally and politically diverse (post-) conflict South African university classroom.