Thinking about Thinking: Dance Education and 4E Cognition

Summary

Dance educators face a challenge from the Western assumption, rooted in Cartesian dualism and reinforced by the computer metaphor of mind, that thinking is separate from bodily action. This view reduces students to inputs and outputs, but dance education has long offered a counter-narrative, integrating conceptual and physical learning through pedagogies and neuroscience research showing their deep interconnection. Despite this history, dance educators can still inadvertently separate dancing from thinking about dance in their teaching. The article argues for recognizing the artificiality of this boundary and the transformative power of the thinking body.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This is not a trivial question for those of us who teach dance as part of a tradition of educators who seek to foster the development of critical thinkers or what might be called consciousness-raising education (Dewey 1923; Freire 1970; hooks 1994). It is a particularly complicated question for dance educators in the United States who must contend with the broad cultural assumption that the functioning of the mind is separate from the actions of the body. This notion is sometimes called the Cartesian Dualism rooted in René Descartes’ Cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” which is interpreted to mean that the only aspect of our experience to be trusted is our ability to think. Everything else, including the body, is to be doubted. Descartes’ dualism was reinforced by the more recent cognitive revolution in academic psychology that perpetuated the computer metaphor of the mind in which the senses, like a keyboard or mouse, act as inputs to the mind (Gibbs 2005). Thinking is proposed to be computations carried out on internal abstract symbolic representations. Just as computations are carried out inside the plastic and metal boundaries of the computer, thinking is believed to be carried out inside the skeletal boundaries of the skull. After the computations are completed inside the computer, the results can be sent to a printer to be externalized. Similarly, after the thinking is completed inside the skull, the results can be sent to the body as a series of actions to be carried out. The printer and the body are un-thinking machines that merely follow orders, making the internal external, the private social. This approach to mind and definition of thinking is a peculiarity of White Euro-American traditions. Many other knowledge systems draw more porous boundaries between thinking, acting, interacting, feeling, intuiting, etc. (Cajete 2004; Ramose 2004). It is an approach to the mind, however, that pervades many educational practices and policies in the US. In the ways students are taught and the ways they are tested, students are frequently reduced to eyes and ears as information inputs and hands and mouths as information outputs. Dance education has, from its beginnings, provided a counter-narrative to the Cogito and the mind-ascomputer metaphor. Margaret H’Doubler, the organizer of the first college degree program in dance, articulated a philosophy and pedagogy that consistently and rigorously advocated for dance as a pathway to develop conceptual thinking as it emerged from explorations of the body, movement, and emotion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s a variety of well-respected and still widelyused pedagogies were established that intentionally integrated and developed conceptual thinking through physical practices (Green Gilbert 1992; Hutchinson Guest 1995). National and state standards for dance are an articulation of a broader set of expectations that are both physical and conceptual (National Coalition for Core Arts Standards 2014). Dance education scholars have drawn from increasingly prevalent neuroscience research, which indicates that physical and conceptual systems are deeply interconnected (Batson and Wilson 2014; Minton and Faber 2016). Dance education scholars are also drawing from emerging research in cognitive science to conduct studies that better define the structure and function of creative and critical thinking skills (Giguere 2011; Moffett 2012; Henley and Conrad 2021). Despite this long history, we, dance educators, can still fall prey to the trap of communicating implicit messages to our students that “dancing” happens in one part of class—when we are bending, twisting, jumping, and shaking—and “thinking about dance” happens in another part of the class—when we are talking and writing. It happens at the program level when studio classes are thought of as requiring different ways of thinking than lecture classes. Even though we witness and enact the transformative power of erasing the artificial boundary between the thinking body and the moving mind, we are sometimes constrained by society’s ways of thinking about thinking.