(Damen, Keller, Hamberg, & Bakken, 2016

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This study aim to investigate the perceptions and experiences of student teachers and teacher-educators when participating in an interdisciplinary workshop in which they were to create and explore their own expressive movements and others’ bodily expression. The study employed a qualitative approach, and in order to acquire access to the informants’ lifeworld and their immediate and mediated experiences, open focus group interviews were conducted after the workshop. We base our analysis on inductive coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2015), which then were interpreted in the light of Dewey’s (1934) understanding of the aesthetic experience and Merleau-Ponty’s (1994) phenomenological notion of the body. Our analysis demonstrates that the informants are unfamiliar with using bodily expression, nor do they believe that they have the knowledge or skills needed to create movement and dance, which may explain why they struggle to engage with the creative process. By observing the dances others had created, the informants discovered that there was no right or wrong way of expressing movement. They became a little more open and the experience acquired what Dewey (1934) describes as an aesthetic quality. The music students and teacher-educators are inquisitive and open to using these kinds of creative processes in school. The physical education students have a more reserved attitude to the inclusion of dance, confirming findings in other studies. Based on these results there seems to be a need to create more room for processes that aim for aesthetic abilities in teaching-education.

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