CDEA Conference Presentation

I was delighted to present at the California Dance Educators Association Conference at CSU Long Beach in 2025. Here’s a little about my presentation:

Dancing with Technology:
A Tool for Transformation or a Challenge to Creativity?

Generative Artificial Intelligence (gAI) has quickly emerged as a transformative tool. For dance educators, gAI offers new possibilities for informing our teaching and shaping our artistry, and raises essential ethical considerations. In this session, we will explore how generative AI and language models can be applied in dance education, examining both their potential benefits and challenges. We will discuss how these technologies may contribute to exclusion, and how some students and dance teachers are already using it. I will provide an introduction to gAI, explore its impact on dance education, and engage participants in a hands-on, interactive experience. This session highlights how gAI can amplify or suppress  voices, and will influence how we support our diverse identities. This presentation will raise important questions about creativity, authorship, and the future of education.

For the last number of years I have been teaching movement-focused and reading/writing/talking courses at San Diego State. In 2022 I started reading about the growth of gAI (like chatgpt) and noticed a growing furor in educational literature about these tools and cheating. I played around with choreographic prompts (could this website actually “write” the opening musical number for show), and writing ones (complete this assignment I just gave my students). I sought out a gAI training for educators, read a lot more, and kept coming up short on how to really work with (or against) this tool in collaboration with dance teachers. This presentation is both a manner of sharing what I have learned, and also a proposal to gather ourselves in this topic together. 

gAI is still fairly new to the public, and so I am bringing this area of study to our colleagues at a nascent moment where we can be part of shaping the practices and the research here. I will cite the emerging data on student- and teacher-use, and I will bring out examples of gAI art for us to grapple with. There are articles that have gone from “here is your gAI syllabus template” to “why your gAI syllabus is already obsolete.” I am interested in bringing forth the most current research but then inviting in a long view into our traditions and our future selves for how we approach this tool. 

As a dance educator specializing in both technique and history, I’ve become increasingly curious about how technology intersects with creativity, particularly in the context of generative AI (gAI). My interest grew from questions around how we can leverage emerging technologies in ways that enhance our art form, while also remaining mindful of the ethical implications. As a teacher of both dance technique and writing, I noticed how AI could reshape not only the way we create movement, but also how we communicate and document our art. This sparked a desire to explore how gAI can be used in dance education—both to inspire new possibilities and to challenge traditional concepts of authorship, creativity, and inclusion. In organizing this proposal, I’ve focused on engaging students with practical, hands-on experiences to better understand gAI’s impact, and to prompt meaningful discussions about its future role in dance pedagogy.

The use of gAI is another clear example of access differences for our students and our communities. Who uses the internet and in what ways, radically shapes from whom Language Learning Models are “learning.”  There are tremendous ethical considerations about this presence. Few schools are yet grappling with these questions, and even fewer are considering how these intersect with the performing arts.