Legacy in Dance Education: Essays and Interviews on Values, Pract ...

When we get past the parochial experiences of our early lives and enter the adult world of choice, multiplicity, and professional futures, our interactions with teachers and others who would shape our values and practices also change and evolve. Human influences become less about foundational values and practices that shape bedrock beliefs or world views, and more about values and practices that influence and shape our fit in society and our professional futures. The life of adults is largely a life in work. And it is this significant dimension of legacy that is the focus of this book. I am interested in what values and practices we live with, and what values and practices we take forward that promote or even retool and reinvent our professional work as dance educators. I am also interested in the people who embody (or, have embodied) the values and practices our field takes ownership of. Through working with and being exposed to teachers in my field, my learning and professional development has been inspired and shaped. Habits and practices of action, values, behaviors, and conceptual frameworks, perspectives and consolidating professional opinions about my work have been shaped and influenced by my interactions with my mentors. It follows that legacy is important territory for us to consider, as educators and as people.

The continuum of potential for legacy in dance education—good to bad—is also important territory for our field to consider. In this text, and with the contributions of some of the best dance educators in the field today, I hope to illuminate an arc of consideration on what legacy in dance education may be about, and promote discussion about what gifts legacy in dance education provides us, and how it may even hold us back. What is in the substance of legacy that causes us to be enriched, and what leads us nowhere? What does legacy provide that carries us forward or weighs us down? For legacy is such: It can enrich and it can stifle; it can support and strangle. As a gift, legacy can lead to breaching yet another frontier; as a debt, it may provide us with comfortable permission to live life without question or risk.