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

To a lesser degree, the same may be said for students, who often imitate and model their own interests, responses, and proclivities on those of their mentors. Like children, students absorb and are shaped by what they are exposed to. We take and forward the values and practices that are provided by those who teach us. Our value systems and our practices emerge out of and from our own experiences in learning. And, like our experiences with family or community, we may both benefit from and suffer through legacy in education––what we choose to take forward could provide rich opportunity for professional development and skills in our creativity, or lead to professional dysfunction and imitative stagnation.

As we mature, we (hopefully) become more discerning and aware of the impact values, perspectives, practices, and other influences have on the personal and professional dimensions of our lives. In some cases we edit and evolve the fruits of legacy, while in other contexts we simply replicate values, habits of action or behaviors and remain largely unaware of how what has been left to us shapes the quality and construction of our lives. From my personal experience, I have had to work long and hard to get past the legacy of growing up with a parent who faced significant issues in mental health. Yet, from that same parent, I gained a sense of the aesthetic that no one else in my life’s sphere was prepared to or interested in sharing with me. From my other parent, I absorbed values of steadfastness and the value of work, a propensity to exaggerate, and the lasting gift of humor.

Legacy and Our Teachers

In our early years, our teachers are assigned places in our lives that are often as rarified and special as those we assign our parents. For children, teachers are wrapped in the many colored coats of authority, knowledge, judgment, power, kinship, affinity or antipathy, and emotional closeness or distance. Teachers may be the first objects of our immature desire, or viewed as the embodiment of values and behaviors that we strongly identify with or even adamantly reject. Remote and yet in close proximity, a foil against which we frame and contrast our own nascent values, our interactions with our teachers shape our future tastes, actions, and practices at deep and profound levels.