Dança e educação estética: coreografia de uma vida revista em perspectiva de formação e autoformação

Abstract

Dance has accompanied humanity throughout its history, serving as a language that connects human beings to their deepest emotions, promoting movement, transformation, and meaningful experiences for those who engage with it. Starting from this understanding and articulating this premise with dance education, this study focuses on the training and self-training processes of dance teachers, considering the possible paths that can be taken in building an education geared towards sensitivity, which goes beyond the prism of technical-instrumental training or the mere reproduction of preestablished patterns. Within this scope, the research has the general objective of understanding how experiential knowledge can contribute to the improvement of educational processes that focus on teaching dance from the perspective of aesthetic education. Thus, we intend here to value the teaching knowledge produced in everyday life, recognizing it as legitimate and significant for teacher training and work, especially when it is influenced by aesthetic and bodily experience. This is a qualitative research study, with an autoethnographic approach, which takes the researcher's experience as a field of investigation. The data were produced through the writing of pedagogical letters, which were subsequently analyzed using hermeneutics, seeking to understand the meanings attributed to formative experiences, experiential knowledge, and educational practices in dance. The research demonstrated that experiential knowledge plays a central role in enhancing educational processes in dance when guided by the perspective of aesthetic education. We found that the connection between initial training, continuing education, and critical analysis of one's own practice fostered a shift from a purely technical logic to a teaching approach that understands dance instruction as a sensitive, ethical, and creative experience. We have shown that attitudes such as attentive listening, dialogue, valuing expressiveness, and the ability to learn from everyday challenges constitute an essential practical-reflective repertoire for professional performance. Furthermore, the research highlighted that aesthetic education broadens the meaning of pedagogical practice by recognizing the body, sensitivity, and experience as fundamental formative dimensions, reaffirming dance as a language capable of producing knowledge, strengthening bonds, and contributing to the integral formation of critical, sensitive individuals aware of their place in the world. Thus, we conclude that dance constitutes a powerful formative field for reinventing pedagogical practices and ways of teaching, learning, and existing in education.