2.3 Early Childhood Dance Education

In this chapter, I delineate the artistic and pedagogical foundations underpinning my research. I begin by articulating my conceptual framework, which encompasses dance, improvisation, and early childhood dance education. Subsequently, I situate my work within the existing scholarly discourse by highlighting relevant prior research that aligns with my inquiry. Lastly, I explore dance education through an improvisation-based approach, emphasising its relational and emergent nature.

2.3.1 Central Concepts

Dance and Movement as Mutually Inclusive Partners

The term creative movement is often used interchangeably with dance improvisation. However, several scholars have also pointed to distinctions between the two, highlighting differences such as a particular orientation of consciousness and an aesthetic dimension of embodiment (e.g., Anttila 2013), the activation of the kinaesthetic sense (Stinson 1990; 2005), and the role of pedagogical guidance in transforming children’s spontaneous movements into dance (Anttila and Sansom 2012).

Throughout my research, I have navigated the nuanced distinction between these terms, considering which seems most appropriate in different contexts. In collaborative phases within ECEC, replacing dance with movement seemed tempting, since movement emerged as a more neutral and inclusive term, reducing gendered stereotypes, associations with specific technical forms, and eventual perceptions of dance as a specialised skill inaccessible to many. ECEC staff also noted that cultural perceptions may restrict children’s participation in dance, a concern similarly addressed by Anttila, Martin, and Svendler Nielsen (2019). Despite this tension, I retained dance as the central term, as replacing dance with movement to broaden participation seemed to obscure the artistic–pedagogical essence of my work. Accordingly, dance remains the central educational concept here, emphasising artistic expression and movement awareness that can become part of a wider range of embodied, movement-based practices and learning. This approach aligns with Korpinen’s (2024) advocacy for employing the term dance to enrich and expand conceptual understandings in formal educational contexts. However, rather than rigidly distinguishing these terms as separate, I view them as fluid concepts and embrace their contextual specificity.

From Creative Dance for Children to Dance Improvisation for All

Improvisation-based dance practiced with children is commonly referred to as creative dance. Emerging from the pedagogical philosophies of Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) and Rudolf Laban (1879–1958), creative dance emphasises the natural movement capacities of children and their ability to express themselves through embodied exploration. A wide range of early childhood dance educators—such as Anttila (1994), Viitala (1998), and Hekanaho, Nirhamo, and Stenlund (2015) in Finland, and Joyce (1994), Stinson (1990), Speth (2006), and Gilbert (2015) internationally—have produced practical handbooks to support educators in guiding children’s movement experiences. These works collectively frame creative dance as an inclusive pedagogical practice that values divergent learning modes and transcends conventional artistic and educational boundaries. They have profoundly influenced my development as a dance educator by informing my understanding of pedagogical aims, methods, and curricular content. At the same time, they have prompted me to reconsider how dancing for children might evolve into dancing with children, fostering more participatory and co-creative approaches.

However, despite its progressive ethos, the discourse surrounding creative dance reveals limitations that call for further theoretical and pedagogical elaboration. Stinson (1998) notes the difficulty of engaging critically with creative dance, observing that its emphasis on self-expression, problem-solving, equality, encouragement, and holistic support can obscure more complex or contradictory experiences. The ideals of creative dance risk reinforcing a predominantly Euro-American imaginary of childhood and neglecting embodied experiences of resistance, discomfort, and ambiguity. Furthermore, creative dance has often seemed to cultivate docile, well-disciplined subjects, prioritising conformity over the potential to enact social change. (Stinson 1998)

As mentioned earlier, although creative dance is often equated with improvisation, it typically refers to practices in children’s dance education whereas improvisation more commonly evokes adult or professional contexts. In this study, I intentionally adopt the term improvisation to counter epistemic injustice (Murris 2013; 2016) and ageist binaries that might view children’s dancing as different from or inferior to adults’ dancing.

Early Childhood Dance Education

In general, early childhood dance education aims to support children’s holistic growth, learning, and well-being (e.g., Anttila, Martin, and Svendler Nielsen 2019). In addition to these broad aims, a range of more specific learning objectives, referred to as dance skills, can be identified within the context of dance education. These skills encompass a range of abilities, from basic motor functions to more nuanced capacities such as sensing the rhythmic and qualitative relationship between music and movement, as well as body awareness, motor coordination, aesthetic expression, and physical thinking. These skills can foster the freedom and joy typically associated with early childhood dance experiences. (e.g., Stinson 1990; Bond and Stinson 2000; Sansom 2012).

In the context of early childhood dance education in Finland, a key distinguishing feature is the state-supported system of extracurricular arts education known as Basic Education in the Arts (BEA) (EDUFI 2025). While the BEA framework is well known for its significant educational benefits in the field of dance, and dance remains one of the most popular art forms within BEA as indicated by its high participation rates (Koramo 2009), it is important to recognise its limitations. At the national level, only a fraction of children participate in basic dance education, with boys and children from multicultural backgrounds appearing less likely to engage (Svendler Nielsen et al. 2023; Ruokonen 2023). Furthermore, BEA’s explicit focus on talent development, while important, may unintentionally foster an environment that appears inclusive in theory but can seem more selective in practice (Svendler Nielsen et al. 2023).

As my conceptualisation of dance education reflects my broad understanding of dance, I approach dance education as grounded in dance as an art form and regard it as a space where creative and artistic processes unfold both in and through dance (Svendler Nielsen et al. 2023). Through an intra-active orientation to improvisation-based dance, I seek to provide holistic and affirmative pedagogical perspectives that regard dance education as a relational, situated, and contextually embedded practice extending to a more/other-than-human perspective. This perspective is informed by transformative, critical, and feminist frameworks within dance education (Anttila 2007; Shapiro 1998; Stinson 2016), aiming at more agentic forms of citizenship for both teachers and children (Sansom 2012). This perspective recognises difference as essential and views dance as a space for expressing and performing difference (Anttila 2003; 2007; 2016; Anttila, Martin, and Svendler Nielsen 2019; Shapiro 2015). Thus, my dance educational aims resonate with current global trends in dance education research, emphasising inclusive practices, collaborative modes of working, and intercultural and interdisciplinary pedagogies, as well as embodied approaches to teaching and learning (Pastorek Gripson, Lindqvist, and Østern 2022; Sööt and Viskus 2014).

2.3.2 Entanglements with Earlier Research

In the Norwegian primary school context, Flønes (2023; 2025; Flønes et al. 2022) has made noteworthy contributions by exploring choreography as a relational, pedagogical, and methodological approach in research. Flønes et al. (2022) emphasises the pedagogical and relational potential of shared dance experiences, suggesting that dance can create a space for children and adults to engage in forms of dialogue distinct from dominant modes of interaction in school settings. In particular, Flønes (2023) addresses the ethical complexities of presenting research involving children, highlighting the methodological, choreographic, and pedagogical implications. She proposes a response-able research practice attuned to relationality, ethicality, pedagogy, choreography, and research integrity. In her doctoral dissertation (2025), she further develops this perspective by proposing an edu-choreographic approach, positioning dance as a performative, relational, choreographic, and embodied educational practice. Building on these overlapping interests, my work extends and adapts these ideas into the context of ECEC, where improvisation-based and intra-active approaches open further possibilities for pedagogical exploration.

Engdahl, Lundvall, and Barker (2022) investigated creative dance in Swedish physical education teacher education, focusing on pedagogies grounded in imitation. Their findings suggest that dance creates spaces for non-predetermined and unpredictable movement, which they link to developing future capacities for navigating unexpected situations. In a subsequent study, Engdahl and Ceder (2023) investigated how creative dance lessons can promote experimentation with materialities in physical education teacher education. Drawing on a Deleuzian approach, they introduced the concept of dancemblage as both an analytical and practical tool for engaging with materialities in pedagogical practice, closely resonating with my thinking through assemblages. They emphasise the pedagogical importance of attending to the materialities already present and entangled in creative dance education, and further underscore the value of consciously inviting these agencies into the classroom to shape students’ movement explorations. Building on this work, my research aims to explore how assemblage thinking can promote the examination of alternative pathways that support exploratory, process-oriented learning.

Lenz Taguchi, Palmer, and Gustafsson (2016) show how experimental dance practices can challenge taken-for-granted notions of the child and preschool practice by opening spaces where children construct subjectivity in new ways. Their approach empowers children to move beyond established routines and familiar patterns, enabling inventive and unconstrained explorations of their physical capacities. Central to Lenz Taguchi, Palmer, and Gustafsson’s (2016) work is the concept of dancing assemblages, which provides a generative foundation for my own pedagogical engagement with assemblage thinking in dance. Collective dance improvisation is described as creating a shared body, an assemblage that is more/other-than-human, constituted not by discrete or functional parts but through actions, performances, moments, and relations (Lenz Taguchi, Palmer, and Gustafsson 2016). The pedagogical focus shifts from fixed outcomes to what dancing sets in motion, allowing children to participate in a body-assemblage that is inherently shared, expansive, and relational.

Gustafsson (2021) conducted a practice-based doctoral study on experimental dance settings in ECEC from a relational ontological perspective. She examined how improvisation-based dance can function as a mode of expression, meaning-making, and communication, emphasising how the researcher’s active participation shapes the dynamic unfolding of events. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, her work demonstrates how such engagement can generate new ways of conceptualising dance practice and the dancing body, as well as alternative approaches to arranging dance with the youngest preschool children. The study positions the body not only as a medium of expression but also as a site of knowledge, recognising children as co-creators of dance experiences, which is an orientation that informs my research.

Dance improvisation as a relational practice and a mode of embodied learning has been investigated by Pollitt, Blaise, and Rooney (2021). They integrate dance improvisation into broader early childhood environmental education as a means of disrupting the often disembodied and disconnected ways in which weather is traditionally taught to young children. They argue that when children attune to weather as phenomena through the embodied and relational practices of dance improvisation, it opens up new possibilities for educators and researchers to consider how such practices can be successfully integrated into early years education. In this context, dance improvisation emerges as an innovative and affective approach to environmental learning. (Pollitt, Blaise, and Rooney 2021)

2.3.3 Improvisation-based Dance Education

The term improvisation originates from the Latin improvisus, meaning unforeseen, highlighting its inherent qualities of surprise, unpredictability, and discovery (Snowber 2002). Within current scholarship, dance improvisation is regarded as an agential (Ravn 2020), playful (Hermans 2022), and participatory (e.g., Bruzzone and Stridsberg 2023; Hermans 2022; 2025; Gibbons and Nikolai 2019; Deans 2016; Chappell et al. 2009) practice. In what follows, I will focus specifically on the relational aspects of improvisation, as also acknowledged by De Spain (2014), Land (2022), Pollitt, Blaise, and Rooney (2021), as well as the emergent qualities central to this practice.

Dance Improvisation as a Relational Practice

Approaching dance improvisation relationally offers fertile ground for developing an intra-active dance pedagogical framework. As Manning (2009, 30) suggests, dancing relationally is not about following predetermined steps, but about ‘moving the relation.’ Dance, then, is a process of continual emergence, shaped by and shaping the entwined forces of bodies, spaces, and materials. Grounded in openness, responsiveness, and attunement to emergent events rather than predetermined outcomes, this approach positions dance improvisation as a materialised practice of intra-activity. Discursively thinking bodies thereby co-create processes of becoming—with one another and within themselves—through movement, as Flønes (2023) also observes.

My improvisation-based dance pedagogical approaches intentionally weave together my own movements, the children’s dances, pedagogical and artistic intentions, the curriculum framework, and the lived realities of the context and community. This approach draws on spontaneous thinking, creative exploration through movement, and real-time decision-making (Foster 2003). It also shifts the pedagogical focus from delivering ready-made movement material toward creating space for the emergence of new movement (e.g., Foster 2011; Gilbert 2015; Manning 2009; Sheets-Johnstone 1999). This approach entails working with emergent qualities, which I discuss next.

Working with Emergence

Anttila and Sansom (2012), drawing on early dance theorists such as Laban and H’Doubler, argue that improvisation-based pedagogies are incompatible with traditional instruction because creative movement cannot be taught through imitation. Instead, the child is seen as an expert in their own movement, while the teacher’s role is to participate and support the child’s embodied meaning-making by providing time, space, and a sense of safety. In this model, the child leads the learning process, transforming the adult’s role into that of a responsive facilitator.

This pedagogical reorientation resonates with Kloppenberg’s (2010) theorisation of ‘post-control’ choreography, which emphasises collaboration and dialogical engagement, redistributing creative authority from choreographer to dancers. Similarly, an improvisation-based dance pedagogy can be understood as a form of post-control education, wherein the educator consciously relinquishes control to allow the learning process to unfold in open-ended, unpredictable ways. However, this orientation does not render dance improvisation neutral; rather, it remains deeply entangled with issues of control and power dynamics operating at bodily, social, and spatial levels, as Martin, Snook, and Buck (2018) also acknowledge.

In practice, improvisation-based pedagogies require educators to embed opportunities for participants’ decision-making throughout the learning process, intentionally leaving space for the unexpected and the emergence of new directions and possibilities (Martin, Snook, and Buck 2018). This shift in focus from knowing to not knowing and working with uncertainty can be challenging for dancers, pedagogues, and researchers (Foster 2003; Snowber 2002). In her doctoral thesis, Valkeemäki (2017) examines dance pedagogy through an improvisatory orientation, arguing that teaching dance requires remaining in a continuous state of improvisation, as each moment is in constant flux. She emphasises that the most essential aspect of this practice is the capacity to believe and trust that a way forward can always be found, even in moments of uncertainty or when no clear direction is apparent (Valkeemäki 2017). Operating within the state of not-knowing involves embracing uncertainty, vulnerability, and a relational responsibility both to and for the other on an embodied level. It entails a recognition that agency does not reside in the control of others, but rather in an openness to the other and to what is not yet known. (Davies et al. 2009)

Dance pedagogical approaches to improvisation-based dancing entail a continual negotiation between structure and spontaneity, familiarity and emergence. Several dance scholars have emphasised that improvisation is not the absence of structure, but rather a dynamic interplay between the planned and the spontaneous (e.g., Foster 2003; Hermans 2022; Ravn 2020; Snowber 2002). A deliberately emergent pedagogical strategy requires educators to find a careful balance between planning and allowing space for creative decision-making (Martin, Snook, and Buck 2018). This approach often involves holding space for both order and chaos, attending to ‘multiple bodies, multiple ways of knowing, diverse trajectories, opposing wills’ (Davies et al. 2009, 1). Such pedagogy demands that educators remain open to experimentation, learning through trial, error, and uncertainty (Martin, Snook, and Buck 2018). Rather than being oppositional, these forces work in cooperation, enabling learning processes that are not end-driven but open-ended and co-created.