Dancing Days With Young People

Abstract

The film Dancing Days With Young People is inspired by art-based research and performative social science. Here artists and researchers examine important issues together. The film follows 1 teacher, 21 university students, and 200 high school pupils from various cultural backgrounds. It focuses especially on the young university students in a challenging course of teaching emphasizing creativity, embodied leadership, and dance. Here, they also teach the high school pupils various styles of dance. Research shows that it can be challenging for many young people to develop teaching competency and the embodied leadership they will need in their impending work as teachers. This is also an issue in many university educations and other educational fields. Therefore, the research questions examined how we can develop somatic awareness, creativity, and embodied leadership through innovative educational processes. And how close-to-practice, artistic elicitation methods may contribute to both researching and portraying this process. The film was created by collaboration between a researcher and teacher, a documentary film instructor, a musician, and a creative film editor. The film was both part of the research process and the result of the creative collaborative. It may be regarded as a coproduced research publication in itself, as it visualizes and documents the findings of the project. Therefore, the film may be seen as a contribution to the growing field within performative social science. Here, the film illustrates especially well the intense moments in sensual emotional situations, which cannot be captured solely in the world of words. The findings show that embodied leadership may be developed through real-world learning processes in which joyous, vulnerable, and subjectively experienced risk-filled situations become part of a common creative educational journey. The teaching methods and the theme of embodiment and leadership may be applicable in wider educational fields.