Dans i skolan om genus, kropp och uttryck

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a continuation of my licentiate thesis from 2007 “Dansens plats i skolan. Tradition, utveckling och lärande i Skellefteå kommun” [‘The place of dance in schools. Tradition, development and learning and teaching in the Municipality of Skellefteå’]. The overarching aim of the thesis is to interpret and understand dance as a form of expression and phenomenon in schools, which comprises dance teaching, learning in dance, and dance teachers’ attitudes, experiences and ideas. Dance teachers’ experiences and conceptions of dance teaching are at the centre of this thesis. The aim is to interpret and understand dance teachers’ attitude to gender as well as dance as an area of knowledge from dance teachers’ perspective. In the thesis the following will be answered: How do dance teachers describe their experiences and conceptions of gender in the dance teaching of preschools and schools? What is dance teaching in schools from dance teachers’ perspective? The empirical material is principally based on a questionnaire study implemented in the spring of 2008 and answered by 154 dance teachers but also on observations of dance teaching in schools from 2006. The thesis takes a hermeneutic approach. Gender theories and phenomenological theories have been of major importance for the understanding of the result. The thesis deals with central concepts such as ‘gender structures’, ‘masculinities’, ‘relations’, ‘the lived body’, ‘the lifeworld’ and ‘transcendence’. Dance teachers perceive marked differences between girls and boys in three respects. There are fewer boys than girls that are favourably disposed to dance, that clearly try to imitate the dance teacher’s movements and that give full expression to lyrical, peaceful exercises. There is a connection here to dance as a femininely coded subject, homophobic conceptions and the distinction between masculine and feminine movements. As regards wealth of ideas in improvisation exercises, a majority of dance teachers think that there is no difference between boys and girls. Nearly all dance teachers think that they work with the same types of movements for boys and girls, while at the same time they conceive of sex and gender in different ways. This study shows many experiences of dance where gender does not play any role but also that dance in schools may imply a gender-stereotyped attitude. There is also a common view among dance teachers of what dance teaching is. Dance has an existential dimension where the lived body is emphasized. In the thesis the so-called “boy problem” is questioned, since boys’ verbal deprecation is not visible in the dance teaching itself.