Chapter 4 Aspirations and Challenges
4.3 A Challenging Environment: “I Appeared Really Naïve”
4.3.1 Introduction
While all of my interviewees value Quality-Oriented Education Dance (QOED) and its potential for transforming dance education in China, they revealed that they faced various challenges during the implementation of QOED, which made it hard to achieve the aspirations of QOED. This includes challenges presented by institutional expectations, student expectations and their own capabilities as teachers. Central to this latter issue is their uncertainty over how they can make pragmatic decisions when teaching so as to not simply fall back on former educational purposes and approaches to teaching. This raises questions regarding how they foster peer relations and facilitate collaboration within small group tasks, which will be explored further in Chapters 5 and 6.
4.3.2 Institutional Challenges: “Can We Win With This Piece?”
All of my interviewees reflected on how their institutions directly challenged the actualisation of QOED in the curriculum by retaining mandates that adhere to a hierarchical structure and promote dance learning as a product-oriented education. This predominantly involved references to the curriculum established by what is perceived to be the pre-eminent
professional dance training institution in China: the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA). As one interviewee recalled, “My dean kept telling me to just follow the teaching curriculum of BDA”. This inevitably creates dilemmas for the teachers to teach QOED within their institute’s curriculum, as the teaching method at BDA is designed to train professional performers. To follow the BDA curriculum means to follow a more exclusive educational purpose: to select and train rencai (see Section 2.5.5) to become elite professional dance performers. This contrasts with the educational purpose of QOED, which seeks to foster a more inclusive learning environment that promotes the creative capabilities of all learners. In contrast, the educational purpose of the BDA promotes a more authoritarian pedagogy, with the teacher as an authority in the classroom, thus inhibiting the QOED teacher’s identity transformation to a more relational and responsive student-centred pedagogy.
Even in contexts in which institutions were more supportive of a QOED curriculum, expectations remained that the teaching of QOED follow the highly prescribed teaching model established by the existing dance teacher education, which strictly adhered to the BDA curriculum. As one of the interviewees stressed, this included the expectation that the QOED teacher only teach what appears in the course materials of the designers of QOED, and that this should not vary:
The dean of my university asked me to ask teachers who were in the QOED experts’
team to provide the full plan for the course before teaching QOED in my university.
For the first semester, the outline they presented was a summary of lesson
examples/patterns that could be used in schools. As a result, for a whole semester I was only permitted to repeat the lesson examples presented in that brief summary, which were designed for high school students, not the trainee-teachers of those high school students.
This habitual adherence to national institutional hierarchies thus manifested in a rigid
approach to the implementation of QOED at a local level. Further negotiation on this process was not encouraged and so, within the hierarchical university context, the peculiar outcome
above was enforced. This further suggests the while the educational content of QOED was clearly communicated, its wider educational purpose was not so convincingly shared. In the context of such an institutional hierarchy, this limited the teacher’s ability to respond to the learners’ needs and extend the curriculum content based on their own understandings of the educational purpose. Inhibiting the teacher’s agency in this way inevitably led to a very restricted curriculum and ultimately involved much repetition of learning content, leading to dissatisfaction among learners (discussed further in Section 4.4.2).
The communication of the educational purpose of QOED was similarly not convincingly shared with the high schools in which the trainee dance teachers subsequently engaged in practicums. As a result, the QOED teachers faced further challenges from the school principals:
We had trainee teachers/students going for internships in primary schools. We always received feedback from schools, ‘the content that your students taught in the semester could not be used to present dance works at art festival performances and dance competitions’.
This demonstrates how QOED teachers are required to satisfy not only their university’s expectations but also those of high schools. These high schools retain established purposes of dance education associated with providing the school with a means of gaining societal
validation through the presentation of competitive artistic performance learning outcomes.
This ultimately translated to schools wanting practicum dance teachers to come in and authoritatively teach a set piece of dance repertoire to students in a way that would emulate a highly professional dance performance. As one interviewee reported, she often received questions from school principals like, “Could you teach a dance piece? Could we use the piece to attend an arts festival competition? Do you think we can win with this piece?”
Another interviewee explained, “As competition wins can help schools to increase their admission rates, they really like to participate in dance competitions”.
This rationalisation extends from a wider valuing of competition within education in China (as explored in Section 2.5) and, thus, a valuing of artistic products over artistic processes as the educational purpose of dance in the curricula. Under such a competitive and product- oriented educational system, the QOED teachers found it difficult to rationalise the relevance of QOED.
Pressures and restrictions emanated not only from the wider educational environment but also from the QOED teachers’ colleagues within their dance departments. As one interviewee explained, other teachers in the university would challenge her and say, “What kind of significance does this class have for students and children?” As a result, she perpetually felt the need to evidence a positive impact on students in a short time. This contrasted with her own expectations of QOED: “The QOED class values processes, and it takes time for results to appear”. She went on to emphasise that her aspiration is to teach students to be creative, and that this emerges from the process rather than the product.
In these ways, the QOED teachers felt challenged by their by their own institutions and the wider educational environment. The absence of societal acceptance of the educational purpose of QOED meant that even when the QOED content was accepted within the
curriculum, it was still expected to adhere to the predominant educational purposes for dance education: to train professional dancers to be better than other dancers.
4.3.3 Student Expectations and Dissatisfaction: “Whatever…”
It can seem paradoxical that students would be among those most resistant to a shift to more student-centred learning, but this appears to be not uncommon within dance education in China (Rowe & Xiong 2020; Rowe Xiong & Tuomeiciren, 2020). My interviewees indicated that they faced further challenges from their student’s attitudes to QOED classes, describing how they seemed generally apathetic to it and did not really engage. As evidence, an
interviewee noted, “In classes, they are often distracted. Some students play with their mobile phones; some students are absent-minded”. This could lead to difficulties managing the classroom and a downward spiralling relationship with the learners, as the teachers felt the need to emphasise the importance of learner engagement to the learners. As another
interviewee remarked, “If I ask the students to re-engage in the class, they would feel that I am criticising them”. This concern that they may appear to be blaming the students for not engaging further moved the teachers into a sense that they were reconstructing an
authoritarian pedagogy. As one interviewee explained, not all her students wanted to engage with, or respond to, her,
I would like students to ask me questions and communicate with me. But some students do not want to communicate with me. Their attitude is like ‘whatever’.
This apparent apathy in relation to the course further undermines teachers’ ability to pursue an educational purpose that is meant to be built around the personal aspirations of each student. Again, the wider educational culture of competitive achievement may be seen as establishing a presumed educational purpose and learning mindset among learners, which can be very challenging to disassemble. As one of the interviewees observed, when students get the opportunity to compete, they become more motivated,
They are interested in taking classes like folk dance and learning dance routines. In these they have the opportunity to show others how good they dance, by being positioned in the middle of the very front line.
The other classes that the students take in the current tertiary dance education system focus more on learning dance techniques and repertoire and emphasise a competitive mindset among learners. This presents a deeply entrenched learning mindset that makes it particularly hard for these learners to transition into a QOED class.
Another interviewee commented that students do not understand why they are learning QOED, which “leads to their unacceptance of this class”. This aspiration to present an alternative educational purpose was made even more challenging by the curriculum
restrictions identified in the previous section. Required to only implement the QOED lessons approved by the institution, the teacher could not adapt the curriculum in moments when it felt inappropriate to the learner’s needs and stages of development. When QOED content was aimed at younger learners, it was hard for teachers to justify QOED as a challenging
competence that required deliberate learning:
The first lesson I gave to the students was a ‘high school teaching plan’, but it was just too simplistic for those students. I felt like I appeared really naïve to the students. So I feel that teaching undergraduates using a lesson plan that is so baby-ish and more for primary school students, just turns the undergraduate students off.
In this situation, the trainee teachers were expected to role play the classes that they would teach to younger children, but they did not understand the significance of this educational method. Role play has been established as an effective teaching method often used in training teachers (Rao & Stupans, 2012), as it can motivate and engage students and also provide them with an understanding of the perspectives of others (Moreno-Guerrero, et al., 2020).
The above interviewee quote, however, suggests that this kind of role play method did not motivate students to engage, but instead turned “the students off”. In this context, even the
QOED teacher questioned the level of the QOED learning activity, which was meant to be for high-school students but seemed more designed for primary students. This led to a feeling of it being “baby-ish” and made the learners feel “silly and stupid”.
The more challenging dilemma for another teacher was the repetitive nature of the QOED curriculum. Despite QOED’s agenda of avoiding repetition, the curriculum design
unintentionally led students to "find a pattern" in the QOED class. The students subsequently feel that they are repeating the same content, albeit in different ways, across the whole semester, thus not extending their sense of learning. The teacher had the same feeling when training to teach a QOED class, though she described it as “a feeling of exhaustion”. This challenge could be related to the institutional expectation discussed in the previous section, whereby teachers experienced the expectation that they should follow the teaching of the QOED experts, rather than develop their own teaching approach and ideas in QOED classes.
This reaction from students was a very significant concern for my interviewees. One interviewee described feeling disturbed,
I knew that the students were not satisfied with what they learnt in the QOED classes, and I wanted to solve this problem. I still do not know what to do, which causes me pain.
This sense of the QOED teachers’ own limitations introduces a deeper concern that extends beyond the challenges presented by the educational institutions and wider society. My interviewees acknowledged that it was not only the learners who struggled with making QOED feel meaningful. They noted gaps in their own teaching and learning capabilities that made it challenging for them to fully transition into being able to deliver the expected educational purpose of QOED classes.
4.3.4 Limitations in Professional Capabilities: “I Felt Completely Stuck”
While my interviewees recognised that many institutional and societal challenges for QOED were beyond their control, they also critically reflected on limitations within their own teaching practices. As indicated in the final quote of the last section, these teachers tended to consider that they were responsible for achieving the aspirations of QOED and blamed themselves and their inadequacy as teachers. They generally attributed this to a lack of content knowledge, as one explained,
The main challenge and obstacle of teaching QOED classes is the narrow knowledge that I have. No matter how hard I try to read and learn new things, I cannot read all the new ideas in time. I need to make new discoveries in practice and then further explore them.
While this QOED teacher felt they should continue to evolve as a practitioner by making
“new discoveries” through the experience of teaching, the absence of a deep foundational understanding of not only what and how they were teaching, but also why they were teaching it led them to feel the need to develop a greater theoretical understanding. For others, the sense that their experiences as a practitioner of QOED would soon make up for deficits in theory was clearly refuted,
As a teaching assistant of my supervisor, I started teaching this class in my first year.
When I went to teach this class by myself in the second year, I was very confused at the beginning. I thought, ‘How do I do this?’ In my third year of teaching, I felt completely stuck and did not feel I could really show other teachers what the students had achieved.
As this interviewee noted, even after teaching QOED for several years, a sense of under- preparedness lingered. The need to evidence their progress as a teacher in this regard was heightened within the professional climate, in which they felt the need to not just rationalise this distinctive teaching practice to their colleagues, but to also evidence its value and “show other teachers what the students had achieved”. This sense of not being good enough and needing to improve in order to be considered competent also emerged from the hierarchies within the wider national educational context, which prompted them to compare themselves to leading educational institutions to determine their worth as educators. As one interviewee explained,
Of course, our teachers are not very professionally experienced and recognised. We are not able to teach better than the teachers at Beijing Dance Academy.
This sense that their standards of teaching were always compared and measured against those at the BDA (even though they are teaching different content to different students) emphasises how ingrained the concept of hierarchy is among dance educators in China. This challenges not only their ability to teach in a new way, but to feel confident that they are truly capable of teaching in a new way. When aligned with the prevailing expectations presented by students and institutional leaders regarding what and how dance should be learnt, teachers of QOED can face a seemingly immutable hierarchy.
They nevertheless acknowledged that they are part of a minor pedagogy, and that this sense of teaching in a new way is situated in a wider context of educational reform. This also led them to consider that they were somehow having to overcome the deficit of their previous teaching practices. One interviewee explained,
I used to be a teacher of Chinese classical dance. I know that for me and for students, I have a stereotypical understanding of dance classes. Dance classes must be done in this way, such as basic bar training, but the entire teaching content of QOED class is new.
As this teacher pointed out, her teaching approach in dance classes is influenced by her
“stereotypical understanding of dance classes”. Perhaps distinct from new trainee teacher simply learning about educational methods afresh, new QOED teachers are generally transitioning from previous professional training, where they learnt and taught particular styles of dance (such as “Chinese classical dance”). While this equipped them with a
particular comprehension of what dance entails, it also led them to consider that they have to un-learn their previous pedagogic practices. As teachers experience a significant shift in expectations in the content of what is taught from other dance classes they teach, and how it is taught, they are also finding they need to reconstruct their sense of educational purpose.
At times, the concern that they needed to evidence student learning more accurately led my interviewees into former practices, as they deeply prescribed how a student should behave within a task. This led to the emergence of surprising reflections from my interviewees, which related to how they used group tasks to teach students how to teach creativity. As discussed in the literature review (Section 2.3, the teaching of creativity can require the establishment of an environment that encourages experimentation and risk. This can involve prompts that require students to then develop and generate diverse outcomes within a task.
Within collaborative contexts, this can require collaborators to value the differences emerging from each other. Among my interviewees however, there were several narratives that
emphasised their dissatisfaction when students did not strictly adhere to a very prescribed instruction for a creative task. In the following extended anecdote, one of my interviewees reflects on a task that required students to role-play being young children, that is, to complete a creative task in the way that young children might, so that they would then be able to replicate the same lesson plan to younger children. They felt that their students “did not understand this course was designed for children in grade three of primary school”, and so their subsequent interpretation did not conform to the teacher’s instructions for the task.
There is a big difference between musical expression and dance movement. Dance movement is more about the body, and the musical expression is to shape the image of the character, so it should be in line with and integrated into the lyrics, so it is to convey the feeling of the characters. Actors in musical drama cannot face backwards and cannot have movements on the floor. The lead singer needs to face the
audience.… In my class, students need to complete a musical drama called ‘paper, rock, scissors’. They create their own dance movements and then transform them to the expression of musical drama. I based this on the game ‘paper, rock, scissors’. My goal is to lead the students to imagine their characters for the musical drama through the game. These characters were Paper, Rock and Scissors, and would shape the way they perform through music, singing, body movement and spoken lines. Students were meant to first design their actions/movements for their role through the game, and then get music for their movements. Later, they would have the script, which is prepared by me with lines in it. There are certain lines in each scene of the script which align with the music I chose. For example, for a Rock group, ‘I am a rock, I am the hardest rock’. For the Scissors group, ‘I am a large pair of scissors, sharp and kind, you have to be careful when you cut and cut’. This course is for them to understand some regular patterns and methods of QOED course design. By
experiencing it, they could know how to teach their students in the future. But they didn’t care about the process and the final rehearsal. They distorted my work. They ignored the songs I chose. For Rock, I gave the song ‘two tigers’; for Scissors, I used
‘I'm a painter’; for Paper, I used ‘little swallow’. These songs are in line with the characteristics of each character’s image, action and texture. The reason for me to choose these songs was for teaching primary school children that they can better come up with actions/movements, understand the character images through words and the rhythm of these nursery rhymes. The children were familiar with the melody of these songs. However, in the end, when my students (university students) had the end-of- year presentation, they changed the song into an English song ‘We Will Rock You’.
They did not tell me. Therefore, I felt that they did not have a respectful attitude towards the works I created.
As this narrative suggests, the task set for the students was very prescriptive, with students expected to follow a particular narrative, script and characterisation of the game ‘rock, paper, scissors. This contrasts with approaches to creative tasks that encourage students to generate new interpretations and explore different possibilities (Chappell, et al., 2012).
While the prescriptive approach outlined above may impact the sense of agency and creative capability of the learners, for this study it is also worth noting how such a prescribed
approach to creative activity may prompt learners to adopt a sense of inferiority: that they should always submit to the direction provided by a superior source of knowledge on
creative activity. Through comments such as “they distorted my work”, this teacher might be seen as emulating authoritarian expectations often found within professional performance