MAIN IDEA
My desire to explore the subject of this investigation came into being when I visited and lived for some years in several different indigenous communities of Peru. I am a native of Lima, Peru’s capital; when I traveled to my country’s indigenous sites, met their residents, learned from and investigated their cultures, I began to place greater value on the Andean worldview, its cultural bases, and the sacred relationship of humans with the land and the holiness of life at the core of this ancient cosmology. This experience of travel caused a profound change in me—a change in my vision of the world that made me reflect that the objective of being alive is to offer respect to all that surrounds us and to be at the service of everything so as to improve our planet instead of destroying it. Moreover, in the workplace, I have learned that there are a great many educators interested in addressing these issues at the primary, secondary, and higher levels. These are the reasons that animate me to continue in this cultural line and to keep on promoting Andean knowledge for the generations to come. When I arrived in the United States, it was necessary to apply the knowledge I had acquired in order to teach a Peruvian Indigenous dance; the fact that I was now working with a different kind of population made the research that much more interesting. Throughout my experience—now 20 years of dancing and teaching—I have learned and felt the very great power of exploring indigenous understandings via dance.
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This research aims to explore the effects of teaching Indigenous Peruvian dance to people who are not Indigenous. The purpose of this study is to analyze cultural and human values in contemporary communities using the action research method. Equal and important, I used Indigenous techniques to teach both dance and cultural values, wanting to decolonize and deconstruct methodologies in public and private education to examine and recast their impact today. Research into the teaching of Indigenous dance to non-Indigenous people is almost absent in the United States. I think there has been a significant lack of interest in examining how to bring this knowledge to contemporary communities and to the field of arts education or elsewhere. Given this lack, I understand the challenges facing an artist and teacher that come with this thematic approach.
The results obtained from this research will contribute to the evaluation of “cultural values” in non-Indigenous people. Some definitions: “Culture: Broadly, the social heritage of a group (organized community or society)...encompasses all learned and shared, explicit or tacit, assumptions, beliefs, knowledge, norms, and values, as well as attitudes, behavior, dress, and language.” “Values: Important and lasting beliefs or ideals shared by the members of a culture about what is good or bad and desirable or undesirable. Values have a major influence on a person's behavior and attitude and serve as broad guidelines in all situations”. (Dictionary, n.d.) Therefore “Cultural values can be pieced together by observing the various customs that the people have passed down for generations.” (Cultural Values: Definition, Examples & Importance, 2014) These two connected concepts play a central role in an artistic, educational field and offer invaluable resources for the structural formation of human beings.
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As educators, we must be prepared to provide students with an education rich in skills and values to help them face the challenges of the future. We must create different learning paradigms that can help students meet the needs of the present and future and this methodology is one of them. We must develop different ways of thinking, solving problems, reflecting, working as a team, and to communicate in different modes. Clearly, education must provide students with meaningful learning for their intellectual, moral and personal development. I trust in the indigenous technique for teaching dance in the classroom—and within the framework of this 3 research, I relate the efficacy of dance education in providing significant learning that promotes the development of cultural values. “Dancing,” after all, “is a social and cultural activity. Music, and by extension, dance, is intrinsic to culture” (Rabuse, 2017).
Similarly, we need to meditate more deeply on indigenous cultures in the present to access and benefit “the power of dance as non-verbal communication, as a cognitive activity, emotional experience and a way to develop critical thinking skills” (Gibbs, 2018, p. 27) as this seems a really important absence in education. This focus will generate in my students a personal development that complies with the objectives of arts education, as “the purposes of artistic education in the United States are civilization, creativity, communication, and critical thinking” (Airulla 2004, p. 26). In addition, I explore dance teaching with a dynamic approach based on indigenous games, with the aim of illuminating the connection between nature and human beings. I also review the results of the benefits of dance and comparatively analyze the physical abilities of children and adults in the three sites. In the same way, I assess the connection between indigenous cultural values and the cultural values of the city, a dialectic that develops in the educational context and enriches students’ understanding and experience. In the course of this research work, I have realized anew how rich and enjoyable indigenous dance is, and have come to understand the wide array of benefits offered by indigenous dance in the inculcation of cultural values in artistic education.
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A humble teacher of indigenous dances, I have chosen this field out of passion and interest; within it every day I strive to achieve the goal of becoming a graduate of the Master of Arts in Art Education degree with a dance education specialty. In this research, I explore the mighty role to be played by indigenous dance in artistic education, and assert that an ongoing examination of its effectiveness could even open up a new field of study. Such a field has enormous potential for the 4 various dance educators, artists, and dancers who will come to recognize what Peruvian indigenous dance has to offer to arts education.