Sāsā: More Than Just a Dance

Abstract

The traditional Sāmoan dance, sāsā , is familiar to many children and teachers in Aotearoa/New Zealand who have participated in or attended Pasifi ka cultural festivals and other school and community events. While sāsā may be regarded as a source of entertainment with great audience appeal that integrates dance and music, its signifi cance and potential as a multi-literacy and sociocultural learning context is often overlooked. As the authors of this paper, we argue that cultural experiences such as sāsā are educational as well as artistic. This chapter explores the potential of sāsā in education, informed by the merging and emerging perspectives of two authors from different cultural backgrounds who refl ect on their own experiences and understandings. This paper also draws on narratives of a Sāmoan school principal and two pre-service education students. Some of the deeper social and historical features are discussed with a view to considering the sāsā as a means of enhancing artistic, sociocultural and affective benefi ts for learners. We found that as students from different cultures engage in the process of creating and performing sāsā , they construct their own meaning from the experience, bringing stories and characters to life through interplay of all the arts, particularly dance and music. However, before introducing cultural activities such as sāsā to the classroom, it is important to determine how both cultural and educational practices can be honoured simultaneously. The authors draw on Bronfenbrenner's (The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979) ecological model to promote the idea that sāsā has educational benefi ts for both Sāmoan and non-Sāmoan children, and that it is 'more than just a dance.' We pose a series of questions to challenge educators to consider how they might integrate cultural practices into their teaching and learning pedagogy.