Seeking rhythmic attunement: Teaching to dance; dancing to teach

Abstract

Resisting a deep-seated technical perspective of education, I attend to the notion of attunement as a key concept with which to imagine curriculum as a complicated conversation. As fully appreciating the meaning and potential of attunement requires an embodied sense of the word that is deployed by working from within our bodily, social, and autobiographical experiences, I explore the notion of attunement in two of my own educational experiences: learning the Lindy Hop and teaching English. In doing so, I weave the Deweyan notion of habits into the discussion. I apply my search for rhythmic attunement (1) to partners' and students' becoming, (2) to the emerging creative processes of aesthetic/educative experience, and (3) to the yet-to-come through impulse and reflection by theorizing my habits as sensitivity, art, and constant renewals. I hope that my lived account of what attunement may feel and look like in education contributes to enhancing the understanding of what curricular and pedagogical practices may entail when teachers are not reduced to mere technicians. I hope to encourage educators to become nuanced dancers who constantly interpret and reinterpret the moves they have learned and willingly reimagine them while responding to ever-changing educational contexts and relationships.