DANCE AS A VEHICLE FOR PREJUDICE REDUCTION AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

To examine dance as a vehicle for prejudice reduction and second language acquisition in multicultural learning contexts, a dance program was created each spring for four years as a cultural component of the Spanish class for 6th and 8th graders at a southeastern middle school in the U.S. The goal was to facilitate interactions among students of different backgrounds, and positively influence the students’ attitudes toward Spanish language and culture, ultimately reducing prejudice. Constructionism and interpretivism were the lenses for the research questions: To what extent does Latin dance a) foster interaction, friendship, and cooperation among participants from different socioeconomic, cultural, and achievement levels backgrounds and b) influence student attitudes toward Spanish language and culture? The methodology was a “case experiment,” that included an inductive analysis of surveys, interviews, journals, videotapes, narrative analysis, and alternative representation. My findings reveal that dance as text and context can be a powerful tool for attitude change toward the Other: the other language, the other classmate.