ABSTRACT
My purpose in this chapter is to suggest some ideas for teaching dance in physical education classes. This means that I will not spend time discussing the uncomfortable and marginal place dance has tended to occupy within physical education. As important as it is, a number of thoughtful analyses and discussions of this issue exist elsewhere (for example, Brennan 1996; Evans 1988; Flintoff 1991, 1994; Talbot 1997; Wright 1996). However, it is an issue that we can never really put behind us, particularly if one is interested in what is distinctive about dance. In other words, I think we need to admit that dance is qualitatively different from activities such as competitive and recreational sports, and that the things which make it distinctive can also be the things which make it unattractive to physical educators. To take a straightforward example, unlike sport, dance is often explicitly concerned with emotional expression. For many school and university physical educators, expressing emotion for and/or with students is seen as either outside what they perceive as physical education's ‘core business’ or outside of their own personal ‘comfort zones’, or both.
