Conference Agenda

This research takes place in southwestern Europe, in Portugal, and departs from a global/European concern that schooling needs to generate learning with real meaning and significance for students, in order to provide a meaningful educational experience and prepare them for life in society (World Bank, 2018). Education needs to go beyond preparing young people for the labour market, and should insist on skills that can proliferate active, responsible, and engaged citizens (OECD, 2018).

This paper aims to understand dance experiences young people can join in in upper-secondary school. It is part of a larger research project, funded by FCT, that seeks to explore if and how young people's experiences with dance relate to their well-being and their view of themselves as citizens.

Dance is an art form that has always been present in people's lives through festivities, celebrations or other forms of sociability (Guarato, 2015) in Europe and throughout the world. However, this more popular, communal and spontaneous dimension of dance has faded, giving rise to a more elitist approach (Alves, 2020). If on one hand public policies disregard the arts in educational debates, on the other, economically privileged families insist that their children and youngsters attend art academies because they recognize the potential of an education through art (Eça, 2010), and because the practice of a set of so-called extracurricular activities allows them to affirm and reinforce their social status (Macedo, 2009; Macedo & Araújo, 2020). There is a redefinition of the contours of dance. This is embodied by a selection of people seen as able to join in, a restrict criterion about the types of bodies (seen as) adequate and the transmission of steps to be memorized and presented in an irreproachable way, particularly in the scope of classical dance. From this elitism and restrictions associated with "who can dance" emerges the construction of a set of stereotypes. Even if several studies try to discredit the prejudiced views that dance is a target (Hanna, 2010), the connections between people's affective sexual orientation and art, namely dance, tend to be taken for granted by most people (Reed, 2011) leading to constrain an important right, the right to dance and express through it.

Educational research allows asserting that there is a hierarchy of knowledge at the level of curricula, with the arts - and dance in particular - in the last plan (EURYDICE, 2009). The prioritization of reason, of technical and technological knowledge, may neglect ethical, aesthetic and solidary dimensions in learning-teaching as it fosters competition and individualism, increasing socio-educational inequalities. In this line of concerns, a space is opened for the arts, and in particular with dance, to reflect on more human and holistic educational principles.

In Portugal, the Profile of Pupils Leaving Compulsory School (2017) seems to consider these concerns, establishing a set of principles, areas of skills and values that should be included in the education of children and young people, while recognizing the importance of a human-based education. However, when we analyze the curricular matrices for secondary education in Portugal - Decree-Law No. 55/2018 of july 6 - we see that the human, expressive, and artistic dimensions are increasingly neglected as we progress in the educational levels. In fact, the curricular pillars of the education system in Portugal aim to respond to the National Qualifications Framework (2009) which, in turn, is governed by the European Qualifications Framework (2008). In other words, a framework governed by competitive, economic and mercantilist principles that leaves small room for the exercise of a body, brain and soul citizenship.

"If we put Algeria in the title, no one will come!" This is the debate we were having as we prepared to present our reflections from a phenomenological (Van Mannen 2014) collective biographical inquiry into academic time, space and self as international students (Bank and Armstrong 2014, Davies and Gannon 2006). Our inquiry embraced multi-modality and invited the potential for a wider than campus frame to our academic location, as we conducted dialogue walks through the city (Ingold 2015), used the local art museum as provocation for our drawing and metaphor based explorations (Speedy 2008) and drew on our wellbeing practices at gym and mosque to inform embodied activities where we sculpted our graduate destination dilemmas (Boal 1979, Schamer 2015). For our own Arabic-European translocation we were seeking to understand what Lee (2012) terms enculturation, a process of socially becoming attuned to the academic world and the national culture so that a sense of belonging that enables study is established. To do this we opened up the many forms of literacies (New London Group 1996) that were in play.

We kept Algeria in the title of our presentation. However, a series of immigration hurdles meant none of the Algerians in the team would be able to travel from UK to mainland Europe for the presentation. Reluctant to cede the floor to the only UK and full time member of academic staff on the team, we recorded a dialogue between that staff person and one Algerian student and sent the staff member to introduce the video at the conference in an attempt to maintain our commitment to a nonexploitative, accessible research process (Lapadat 2017). As it turned out, our presentation was scheduled parallel to the key organiser’s presentation in the main auditorium. Only the other presenters, chair and one other person strayed into our session in a side room. The mood was subdued to say the least. The other speakers overran and by the time our turn came, the chair was reluctant to take the time for the video presentation to run. In microcosm, this encapsulates the many challenges our attempts to find a place of belonging, from which to develop our work and academic profile, have encountered.