Teaching Philosophy

As a college instructor in both studio-based and academic courses, I intend to facilitate both the creative and intellectual development of students within the frame of civic and ethical responsibility. While I strongly believe that undergraduate and graduate-level choreographers and dance studies scholars need to be encouraged to actively discern their emerging perspectives with regard to best practices and overall currency in the field, I also encourage students to recognize these investigations as culturally and historically formed by the social world.

I firmly believe that architects of dance curricula at institutions of higher education cannot be satisfied with professional readiness as their primary learning objective. Given the dilapidated state of the field, and its erosion to this state over the past 25+ years, students must be prepared to engage with diverse discourses in other artistic and academic disciplines. I believe this contextualization of dance education within a larger frame of liberal arts serves to strengthen the learning objectives of both fields through the cross-pollination of intellectual rigor with embodied research methodologies. In my experience, the most effective problem-solvers are those who are skilled in looking outside of the ideological "box" of their home discipline.

As part of this larger goal of teaching creative problem solving techniques, I place considerable value on transparency in my teaching. I feel that one of the best ways to model critical thinking is to create situations through class discussions where I am forced to think critically, "on the fly." Similarly, I want discussions to be multi-directional and multi-focused in an effort to flatten the hierarchical nature of the student-teacher relationship. This may mean opening my own values, at least temporarily, to a perspective-shift prompted by a student comment, or admitting, "I have no idea how to answer your question right now. Let's see what we can come up with together."

I also attempt to foster high degrees of intellectual rigor in both choreography and academic courses. In the studio, I push my students to examine their choices and intuitive preferences with regard to movement vocabulary, structural and syntactical arrangement, and overall adherence to the research question for the work. In the academic classroom, this plays out in terms of an accelerated "ramping" strategy for course readings, wherein I highlight the cumulative nature of learning through exposure to increasingly sophisticated canonical texts.

I measure my effectiveness as a teacher through improvement in student writing, complexity of ideas in choreographic projects, and the ability of my students to articulate their goals as choreographers and scholars within larger historical contexts. Rather than a single litmus test in assessment, I seek to find trends amongst individual students while recognizing that the development of life-long learners is the ultimate measure of success.

--Peter Carpenter