In France, art education emphasizes making connections with works of art. This is laid out in the Official Journal (2008).   

Existing works of art, in the sense that they are collectively and historically constructed; alongside other common cultural references, give meaning to the use of knowledge in school.

The stakes therefore involved in teaching dance choreography, as well as those involved in the other scholastic disciplines, revolve around bringing knowledge to life in relationship to cultural practices present in social life. 

What conditions are necessary for choreography instruction to allow the emergence of practices that would be judged compatible with referential practices that make up humanity’s artistic culture?

We wish to focus on choreographic content knowledge in the teaching of dance choreography.  Such content is vital because it includes knowledge of specific works of art, art history and applications of physical entertainment.  We attempt to understand how this content knowledge is translated into effective teaching by specifically looking at teachers’ attitudes and orientations toward choreographic learning games.

The analysis is part of the didactical research field which takes into account the joint action within the teacher, students and knowledge triplet, taken as a dynamic system (Brousseau, 1997). This articulated vision of teaching-learning actions partakes of a research program which develops the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007). In order to contribute to this theory, we hypothesize that teaching and learning body knowledge in choreographic practices constitute practices in which language plays a crucial part. These are specific semiotic practices which, in spite the use of the word language, are not limited to verbal language. Calling “learning games” (Sensevy et al, 2005) the actions of a teacher and a student amounts to describing their shared actions about body knowledge. The possibility to define an “epistemic game” inside a “learning game” associated with a “rules” situation (Loquet, 2009) is therefore a hypothesis used to describe the links between knowledge practices and cultural practices.

Two questions guide our research in the schools.  When a teacher works in a pre-determined way in teaching choreography to her students: 1) what exactly does she enable them to do?; 2) what type of relationship can we identify between what students do in class and existing societal norms in art and culture?  To answer the first question, we use the concept of “epistemic game target” and for the second, we bring into contact an “epistemic game target” and an “epistemic game source.”

Brousseau, G. (1997). Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Chevallard, Y. (1992). Fundamental concepts in didactics: perspectives provided by an anthropological approach. In Douady R. & Mercier A. (Eds), Research in Didactique of Mathematics (pp. 131-168), Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage. Loquet, M. (2009). Jeu épistémique et jeu d’apprentissage dans les activités physique, sportive et artistique : vers une approche comparatiste en didactique. Note de synthèse pour l’Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches. Université Rennes 2. Sensevy, G., Mercier, A., Schubauer-Leoni, M-L., Ligozat, F., & Perrot, G (2005). An attempt to model the teacher’s action in mathematics, Educational Studies in mathematics, 59(1), 153-181. Sensevy, G., & Mercier, A. (2007). Agir Ensemble. L’action didactique conjointe du professeur et des élèves. Rennes, France: PUR.