2026 Theses Doctoral

The Possiblities of a Somatic Movement Education Pedagogy for the Early Childhood Dance Education Class: An Inclusion of Personal Literacy Through Dance Education

King, Hetty Malka

This qualitative, pragmatic, practitioner inquiry employed the Mosaic Approach to address the problematic omission of somatic-constructivist principles—the study of one’s lived experience, encompassing body, mind, and spirit (Hanna, 1970)—in the development of early childhood dance education pedagogy.

Data were collected from children aged 4.5 to 5 years who participated in a series of eight somatic movement adventures, designed as multisensory stories, to explore somatic concepts and anatomical principles in a dance education class setting. Data collection methods included observation and field notes, children’s drawings created in response to prompts, stimulated recall, Leuven scale ratings (Laevers, 1994), and memoing.

The findings of this research were that children who participated in the somatic movement adventures, building on their unique prior knowledge and learning affinities, created self-to-self stories. These stories demonstrated somatic awareness evidenced through increased proprioceptive awareness, expanded periods of independent dancing, expressions of inner felt sensations in concrete objects, articulated responses, and the concretization of abstract concepts, thereby developing their personal literacy.

The data were reported as a synthesis in the narratives of three focal children, Tory, Nora, and Leo. Across the data, two key pedagogical findings emerged: the co-creation of rapport and a community of somatic practice, and the pedagogical stance of non-interference, which were identified as the most significant in supporting learning possibilities in a somatic pedagogy for the early childhood dance education class.