Dance Education Leadership Situated: Theories and Contexts

This article situates dance education leadership within the context of leadership and adult learning theories amid our current culture and policy wars. “Great man” heroic trait models are compared with collaborative skills-based approaches. The adaptive challenges we face require “soft” distributed leadership capacities. Aspects of constructive developmental theory, critical race theory, action science, and learning as leading can be productively combined in leadership for dance education justice and equity. I offer a model of learnable Dispositions, Skills, and Strategies as a practical guide to navigating our challenges as a collective community in which embodiment constitutes a unique skill set.