Another change to my own teaching methods has been depersonalizing corrections. Based on Mary Parker Follett’s “Law of the Situation” ([1929] 1955), this way of speaking to students removes some of the power dynamics inherent in the student-teacher relationship, by putting the focus on the shared goal of the work to be done. In moving my language to depersonalization, it is my goal to alleviate feelings of personal shortcomings on behalf of students, as well as their desire to please me as the teacher.
In ballet class, for example, this looks like stating: “The aesthetic of ballet requires us to point our toes”, rather than “Student, you need to point your toes!” With this change, I’ve reminded them of the physical action to take, and the “why” for doing it—to do the work we are here to do, ballet. We are both listening to the aesthetic of ballet for what we should do; in the words of Mary Parker Follett, “...both should agree to take their orders from the situation.” I do not offer a correction because I find the student personally disappointing, or because it gives me my desire. Rather the correction serves the work we both agreed to—create ballet. Likewise, students do not have to point their toes because I said so, but rather because they are there to do the work.
It must also be clear to students that this situation is simply that, this one. As stated above, In my jazz and modern classes, I tell students on our first day that I will not be using ballet terminology in class. Jazz did not grow out of ballet, which I have heard said in previous dance studio settings. Modern dance was created to be the antithesis of ballet. Therefore, I could use the ballet vocabulary to say what they are not, but not what they actually are. Retaining ballet vocabulary in either modern or jazz classes would be inappropriate, and frankly, colonizing.
Styres (2019) quotes Marie Battiste (2013), an Indigenous scholar focused on protecting and promoting Indigenous knowledge systems and education, “in order to effect change, educators must help students understand the Eurocentric assumptions of superiority within the context of history and to recognize the continued dominance of these assumptions in all forms of contemporary knowledge” [186] (33). So, in the ballet class, we examine the particularity of the ballet situation. Students’ first reading is a choice of An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet by Jean Kealinohomoku (2001) and a post from Marlo Fisken’s (2020) blog, A Letter to the Pole Community: It’s time we talk about toe-point supremacy. These two pieces clearly connect the dots of assumptions of supremacy culture—that Euro-centric is more valuable—to the prevalence and significance of ballet in Western dance training and on concert stages. Tuck and Yang (2012) write “The settler positions himself as both superior and normal;...” (6), and this is often what happens to ballet in dance studio settings—it is considered a baseline for other genres, rather than its own particular form, drawn from its own cultural context. In every class, students are encouraged to find the appropriate cultural context from which to consider their situation.
Here we find a key part of Follett’s “Law of the Situation” ([1929] 1955): “Our job is not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best discover the order integral to a particular situation” (59). I appreciate this idea applied to pedagogy; our job as teachers is not to order students, but rather to create space and experiences for them to engage in the work, so that they learn what is needed.