Discipline With a Heart: The Engendering of Ethos and Professional Perception in Folkloric Dance

• In Event: Discovering (to Construct) the Educational Possibilities of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Video-Based Linguistic Anthropological Approaches

Abstract

"One of my favorite things is for parents to come and observe one of my classes because there’s a lot of love coming from me, but there’s also a lot of discipline and, yeah, I need to make sure that [the students] feel that, too."

The headnote is a quote from a maestro (teacher) of traditional Mexican folkloric dance. His words make explicit that learning to dance is demanding and requires discipline. Yet, as a teacher, he needs for the child, who is encountering a novel challenge, to recognize she is supported within his caring tutelage. The teacher further implies parents wish for their child to learn discipline as part of learning a culturally-sustaining practice.

That learning is hard and requires and ethic of discipline is rarely acknowledged, however, in discussions of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017). Perhaps partly due to this neglect, discipline is often viewed within broader educational discourses as pejorative, or harsh. My research in the ballet folklórico setting instead shows discipline to mean for one to give attention to a practice, put time and focus into it, and to value it. Further, it evidences that this ethos goes hand-in-hand with the child’s development of the knowledge and capabilities required for skillful performance and for the troupe’s collective advancement as an ensemble. It is discipline with a heart.

Recent scholarship (e.g. Vossoughi, 2021), which considers the ethical and experiential quality of relations within embodied learning, frames how I investigate the engendering of skilled performances (Kendon, 1990). Furthermore, Goodwin and Smith’s (2021) notion of professional perception provides a basis for understanding how the perceptual and somatic features of enskillment achieve their relevance (to participants and analysts alike) through the systematic embodied and discursive practices through which actors make them publicly comprehensible.

I apply microethnographic (Erickson, 1992) methods of video analysis to describe the pedagogical moments—and the interactional practices of which they are comprised—that are pivotal to a child’s development of the ethos and professional perception of skilled performance in folkloric dance. I look, for example, at how the maestro used touch to guide a boy’s posture, morphing the child’s form from the awkward slump of a pre-adolescent to embody the dignified broad chest of the charro (cowboy). I also focus on moments of frustration or, alternately, those of breakthroughs. An example of the latter is when a young girl performed a zapatear sequence of rhythmic stomps well but not with precision. The maestro exclaimed, “Beautiful!” Then with a serious tone, he said, “Now…Do that again. Don’t/stomp/so/hard,” pausing after each word for emphasis.” In her repeat performance, the nails in the child’s shoes made a light, crisp sound and her face beamed with delight as she recognized her achievement.

In describing the disciplined practices which engender in children the ethos and professional perception of a folkloric dancer, this study responds to calls for equity-focused scholarship to value the affective, embodied, and multisensorial ways of knowing of children from nondominant backgrounds (Bucholtz et. al., 2018).

Author

• Sarah Jean Johnson, University of Texas - El Paso