"Inside Your Own Bodies": Multimodal Literacy in a Racially Diverse Youth Dance Organization

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Expanding Modalities for Critical Engagement: Contemporary Research in Multimodal Composing

Abstract

This paper considers how youth participants in a community-based dance school thwarted oppressive language embedded in a dance form’s lexicon by locating power in their dancing bodies. For participants in the study, the body spoke louder than words. Youth learned to read and speak with their bodies as text (Mills, 2010). Studying dance became a way for youth to develop cultural competence and a socio-political awareness (Ladson-Billings, 1995) about “bodies of color” in performance (participant interview). By suggesting educators can support youth as they learn to read and speak with their bodies, the research also suggests dance education can be used to combat inequality. This paper contributes to literature on multimodal literacy, critical dance pedagogy, and embodied learning in dance.

Authors

• Betsy Maloney Leaf, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Bic H. Ngo, University of Minnesota