Conference Agenda

This study examines non-professional adult dance pedagogy as a transformative practice, focusing on its impact on Social Aesthetic Perception (SAP) - adults’ perception of aesthetic qualities, interpretation of social cues, and co-creation of meaning through movement. SAP is conceptualized across three subscales: embodied perception (individual growth), social perception (relational growth), and integrative reflection (community-level growth). Mezirow’s (1995), Dewey's (1934), and Berleant's (2023) transformative learning theory, along with arts and social easthetics provide the theoretical grounding for understanding how adults shift their meaning perspectives through embodied critical reflection, aligning closely with SAP by illustrating how dance can reshape individuals’ perceptions of themselves, others, and the group.

Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, approximately 100 adult learners complete the newly developed SAP Scale (SAPS) and an adapted Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI; Schraw & Dennison, 1994). A subsample of 10–15 participants contributes interviews and observations. Preliminary findings suggest that sustained engagement in dance enhances SAP, self-awareness, and relational sensitivity, generating a “ripple effect” in which individual learning radiates into community-level outcomes.

Implementing SAPS in real-world dance classes challenges traditional adult learning (AL) measures that isolate cognitive, emotional, or social outcomes. Early results indicate that embodied dance experiences can foster aesthetic and communal capacities, demonstrating how practice-based research can test and transform AL theory.

This paper emerges from the European project EXPECT_Art: EXPloring and Educating Cultural Literacy Through Art (HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-01, grant agreement 101132662), which seeks to identify the barriers and potential of promoting critical cultural literacy through the arts in formal education (EXPECT_Art, 2025). Within this framework, the contribution is based on a case study developed by the research team of the University of Barcelona in a public school in the city. The research focuses on how artistic practices can overflow and reconfigure certain notions of the body embedded in the curriculum of primary school.

The study is grounded in an understanding of the curriculum not merely as a set of prescribed content, but as a discursive and material apparatus through which bodies are taught, shaped and regulated within educational contexts. As Paraskeva and Steinberg (2016) argue, the curriculum operates as one of the key devices through which modern schooling produces and reproduces hegemonic ways of being and thinking. In this sense, the curriculum not only structures what is to be learned, but also delimits how bodies can appear and matter in the classroom, shaping subjectivities and forms of participation (Gore, 2000; Hernández-Hernández, 2017).

In the current Catalan educational framework, organised around a competence-based curriculum (Decret 175/2022), education is presented as a holistic process aimed at cognitive, emotional, social and cultural development. Although the body is formally recognised as part of this integral formation, its presence across the curriculum is uneven and fragmented. While in early childhood, education about the body is explicitly foregrounded as a central means of learning through sensory and experiential engagement, in primary education it becomes progressively marginalised. The body tends to be confined to specific areas such as physical education and, to a lesser extent, the arts, while in so-called core subjects it is largely reduced to a functional or instrumental dimension (Rosales, 2010).

This transition is not neutral. Between stages, the body shifts from being a means of learning to becoming an object of knowledge (de Riba Mayoral et al., 2024). It is increasingly approached as something that must be measured, managed, and optimised in relation to health, behaviour, emotional regulation, and cultural norms. This conception is rooted in a modern epistemological tradition that privileges rationality, control, abstract logic, and functionality over embodied, sensory, and relational ways of knowing that foreground bodily experience.

In response to this background, the study draws on feminist decolonial (Anzaldúa, 1987; Lugones, 2008) and feminist new materialisms perspectives (Barad, 2007; Revelles-Benavente, 2025), which understand the body not as a stable, autonomous entity but as a situated, relational and constantly becoming assemblage. From these perspectives, bodies are constituted through their entanglements with other bodies, with materials, with spaces and with cultural discourses, and knowledge is always produced in and through these embodied relations (Haraway, 1988). In this sense, how bodies are positioned, allowed to move, and invited to participate in school contexts is never neutral, as they always involve political and ethical dimensions (Federici, 2022).

Situated in this theoretical horizon, the arts appear as a particularly fertile space for troubling dominant curricular constructions and constraints about the body. Rather than conceiving arts education as the transmission of artistic contents or techniques, this paper understands education through the arts as an embodied and situated pedagogical practice (Hernández, 2019) that mobilises bodies in action and opens up multiple ways of sensing, knowing and meaning making. Arts-based practices provide multimodal methods that allow bodies to experiment, to play and to create, generating movements and affects that exceed predetermined curricular outcomes (Atkinson, 2018; Calderón-García & Hernández-Hernández, 2019).

This contribution responds to the call to conceptualize new horizons to broaden the perspectives of the relationship between research, art and education. The proposal specifically concerns adolescents and the challenge of engaging a segment of them, often the most vulnerable, in art-mediated pedagogy.
The construct of seeing without being seen, a recurring theme in myths, has recently (Lancini, 2025) become a key to understanding the emotional state of adolescents in the current context. Indeed, they are immersed in a stark contrast between the spectacularization of more superficial phenomena, which corresponds to an "invisibility" of the emotions they experience most authentically and which are not truly heard.
The paucity of studies on adolescents only confirms this difficult regime of visibility. This gap is particularly acute when discussing youth artistic enjoyment (rather than its production) and when distancing ourselves from market research in which adolescents are listened to solely as consumers.
This proposal focuses on watching theatre (rather than making theatre) to reflect on adolescence today and the implications of a different approach, including in pedagogical and artistic discourse. The hypothesis we seek to demonstrate is that studying spectatorship can be a keystone. This broadened focus highlights four directions.

1. The invisibility of a significant segment of adolescents who do not participate in performance workshops, due to a difficult relationship with their bodies and emotions, often conditioned by gender stereotypes about men. Very often, these same adolescents fit into the category of though guys well characterized by Bertolini (1993/2015). Indeed, unless there are specific projects in juvenile detention centers or communities activated by particular projects, the workshop primarily engages students who attend high schools and who come from families with fewer problems of economic or social vulnerability.
2. The pedagogical importance of being within invisible dimensions, especially considering how necessary it is to reflect on visibility in light of developmental psychology and phenomenological observations related to social media. Instagram, for example, documents a strong tendency to see (many followers) without being seen (or to be seen through ephemeral images): few posts, profile pictures that hide the face, communication through stories that last 24 hours at most.
3. The fruitfulness of a more focused study on seeing is confirmed by some insights from the literature that has timidly attempted to highlight this trend. For example, the initial results of the neurocognitive approach with the theory of mirror neurons applied to spectatorship in the studies of Omasta (2011), and Sedgman's (2018) theory on the rules of theater as a barrier for young people, especially when it comes to boys and girls outside the white, lower-middle-class canon.
4. The need to move beyond stereotypes of seeing as a necessarily passive action (Ranciere) and of studying the audience as a practice necessarily tied to marketing (Reinelt, 2014).

This phenomenon confirms that the construct of visibility must be studied for its consequences in both the educational sphere (for example, in teacher training) and the artistic sphere. In an era marked by the collapse of the disciplinary system in favour of the semi-technical media system (Barone 2021), intensifying our focus on the gaze of adolescents becomes essential for delving deeper into both artistic and pedagogical discourse.