1. Sherry Shapiro, Ed.D.
Professor of Dance
Meredith College
Raleigh, NC USA
My presentation will focus on my recent work in South Africa that continues my
interests in dance education as a means of developing the self and social
understanding of young women. This project brought together undergraduate
students from the University of Cape Town with adolescence girls from a
community outreach program in one of the Townships. Its focus was on their
gaining greater critical understanding of how their identity, both racial and gender,
is shaped and influenced in contemporary South African society. This project is part
of my on‐going research into the way that arts/dance education can be a powerful
vehicle for developing critical social awareness that in turn can lead to more agentic
and empowered forms of citizenship.
My pedagogic work is grounded in a number of perspectives; these include critical
and feminist pedagogies, feminist research methodologies, and ideology critique.
These perspectives are integrated into a philosophy of arts education that sees the
aesthetic as a means of “making the familiar strange” and being a catalyst for greater
autonomy and agency among young women. I am especially interested in the way
that personal and embodied experience can be explored as a medium for self and
social transformation. My choreographic project in South Africa was a powerful
means of highlighting the complexity of identity within an emerging democratic
society and the wider influence of global media socialization on the lives of girls and
women. Here, issues of tradition, ethnicity, economic inequality and national
cohesion provided a rich pallet for the development of my research.