ABSTRACT
With calls in dance education for routes forward that provide for alternatives to harmful pedagogies, the Activist Approach to teaching dance offers one way to push against the status quo of authoritarian and abusive practices. This chapter highlights the use of the Activist Approach to teaching in a middle school dance club as a way to authorize student voice in the learning context and co-create paths forward. This chapter overviews the experience of building a foundation, broadening perspectives, and co-constructing curriculum with the dancers, and it highlights examples of what the facilitators gave up in order to re-tune their ears as well as what they gained as a result of redirecting their actions to respond to their dancers. The Activist Approach offered a reflexive practice not only for the dancers to develop language for their learning interests and needs but also for the teaching practitioners to examine how and why they do what they do to best support learners along their journey.
