Abstract

This dissertation is a rationale for dance studies as a field of inquiry in liberal arts learning. It seeks to identify what is inherent in dance that can advance the young adult liberal arts learner in the development of her/him self as an individual. It also seeks to locate dance within a critical epistemology and a dance tradition that validate it as an expressive inquiry. Finally, the dissertation seeks curricular form and pedagogical processes that make the potential contribution of dance available in a general education setting. ;The process of inquiry is collaborative. The form is found in the alternative-phenomenal-naturalist paradigm where insights emerge at the confluence of streams of personal and theoretical knowledge. Dance, here, is being thought of as a synoptic discipline, one that weaves together a range of outlooks drawn from fields of dance, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and pedagogy. It is treated as a synthesizing inquiry into being as well as knowing. ;Theory is grounded in pragmatist humanism as articulated primarily in the writings of William James and John Dewey. Emphasis is placed on an aesthetic that values somatic experience and an epistemology that centralizes experience, reflection, and connection in the construction of personal knowledge, understanding, truths, voice, and agency. ;Practice is grounded in the embodied dance of personal expression pioneered by Isadora Duncan, an interdisciplinary curricular approach advocated by Margaret H'Doubler, and an aesthetic of immediacy espoused in the work of Erick Hawkins. ;Both theory and practice are intended to inform a personal embodied dance which might be thought of as yet another synthesis--of logical, relational, and imaginative understanding. ;The dissertation suggests that enriched ways of being and habits of mind are available to young adults who find their dance within the evolving 'dance studies' program at Allegheny College. It further argues that such habits of mind and ways of being are in harmony with the stated goals of liberal arts learning as these include standing within a truer self, connecting one's experience to the larger world of ideas and values, experiencing enriched ways of knowing and learning, and living imaginatively