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Rebecca Pappas Eligible Member // Teacher
IDOCs » Bodies in The World
How do students use dance history as a set of tools to perceive the importance of bodies in the world?
2015.07.14

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This is a video of one of my students at a large, diverse, community college in Southern California reading from her Dance Ethnography Paper on a community of practice. Attached is the assignment.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T03PtwPjbAT4d6VF7Huj5GuVfhDBb9jciMgJdktf03g/edit?usp=sharing

I give this assignment in order to emphasize the crucial importance of bodies in all types of cultural practice: what our bodies are doing tells us what a given culture values. The connection between bodily practice and cultural values is foundational to all of my dance history teaching. The students need to identify a local "community of practice" i.e. a gym, a dance studio, a retail outlet, a church, etc. and observe the community for 12 hours over the semester. They then write a paper that summarizes their findings. In this clip a woman reads a beautiful section from her study of her own very large multi-denominational Christian church. This video captures the realizations she finds in flipping from "inside" to "outside" the culture. 

https://vimeo.com/81528482


Comments:
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Defne Erdur (Editor) // Admin
2015.07.15
Dear Rebecca, thank you for your sharing! Could you please upload your links here on our site, so that if ever vimeo or google decides to shut down we still have them on our archive here! for video upload please check help session: http://www.idocde.net/pages/53 - Thank you...


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Sabina Holzer Eligible Member // Teacher
2016.03.04
Dear Rebecca, thank you for sharing! Your idoc stimulate me to observe bodies in all different situations. The assignment adds differnt way of entrance and reflection! Bests, Sabina


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