Kinesthesia and Cultural Affordances: Learning Physical and General Kinetic Concepts in a Tertiary-Level Contemporary Dance Classroom

In this study, we frame learning in the tertiary-level contemporary dance class as a process of developing culturally situated shared patterns of skilled action and attention through dynamic engagement with kinetic experience. Extending existing scholarship on dance learning, we adopt the framework of cultural affordances to understand the developmental relationship between physical and general categories of attention during the learning process. Based on qualitative analysis of student and teacher interviews, we contend that the dance classes were laboratories in which cross-domain mapping (physical and general) was leveraged to develop students' kinetic and attentional skills. Understood in this way, the physical concepts and the general concepts worked in a helical fashion, cycling through dynamic engagement with kinetic experience and the development of attentional awareness, not as pure repetition, but as a progression toward more complex, skilled, and nuanced ways of moving.