Doxic agreements and the mobilisation of agency: examining students’ engagement with cognitive reflection in relation to the dominant pedagogical discourses of western dance technique education

Rimmer-Piekarczyk, Rachel (2021) Doxic agreements and the mobilisation of agency: examining students’ engagement with cognitive reflection in relation to the dominant pedagogical discourses of western dance technique education. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This PhD thesis explores the concept of agency in relation to the dominant, or ‘taken for-granted’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 164) pedagogical discourses of western dance education. Situated in a Level Four British university context, the author investigates how such discourses have come to exist through the discursive practices (Foucault, 1972) that have created them, exploring what needs to occur to intervene within these repeated cycles of behaviour. Investigating the idea that the dominant discourses do not foreground a reflective approach to learning dance technique and, thus, limit the opportunities for teachers and learners to mobilise agency, the author examines the extent to which the ‘doxa’ (Bourdieu, 1977) of the dance technique class can be disrupted through utilising what she refers to as a ‘reflexive-dialogical’ approach to learning. This approach draws on concepts from the fields of: embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 2016; Shapiro, 2011, 2014): social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1962): experiential learning (Kolb, 1984, 2015): reflective practice and practice-as-research (Schön, 1983, 1987; Nelson, 2006, 2013): and psychophysical approaches to performer training (Zarrilli, 2009; 2020) to explore the relationship between cognitive reflection, the embodiment of dance techniques and agency. Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the dialogical is also used to examine the specific way that dancers are constructed by the broader pedagogical and aesthetic discourses that they participate in. Through analysis of the data gathered from two iterative cycles of ethnographic-action research, the author proposes the idea that the teacher and her students to enter into a ‘doxic agreement’ with each other. Through engagement with a reflexive-dialogical approach to learning dance technique, social agents ‘reconstitute’ (Barnes, 2000: 26) the existing pedagogical discourses and construct alternative discourses. The way this process allows social agents to construct their moving identities is explored, while recognising that this phenomenon occurs in relation to the constraints of the doxa and the broader socio-cultural and political forces at play.