Exploring Social and Moral Learning Frameworks Through Collaborative Inquiry

This article reflects on the best teaching practices explored and developed by members of a teachers’ community and action research project in Arizona. The project is an ongoing collaborative inquiry and curriculum development endeavor that involves seven dance educators who are currently teaching or have previously taught in secondary dance education classrooms, mainly in Arizona. Tied by our common sustained interests in developing and implementing student-centered and democratically oriented pedagogical frameworks, we gather monthly to query our teaching experiences, create pedagogical solutions to the problems we have identified in our classroom communities, and envision new paradigms for practice that address the complex needs of twenty-first-century high school learners. As we have worked together in this professional development commitment, we have discovered the potential of the pedagogical frameworks we have constructed that strive toward best practices through processes of dialogue, critical inquiry, and an emphasis on embodied learning and social and moral educational frameworks.