School education: pedagogical practices for teaching circus

Abstract

In the last three decades the teaching of circus activities in formal education (schools), especially at the elementary level, has revealed one of the main innovation of this discipline. As recent studies point out, this fact is seen in the international scenario and also a trend in Brazil. The interesting of educational professionals (pedagogy; arts and physical education) in circus art knowledge, allowed an exponential increase of academic research production in this area, as the publication of a broad set of scientific papers, the majority of them as "experience reports". The analyses of these research production revealed to be fragile in theoretical foundation mainly because of the scarce pedagogical systematization, and therefore, has given an only a few contribution to the scientific advance in this area. For more than one decade, we have studied the teacher experiences in Brazil and also in other countries as Argentina, Spain, France and Australia. This analysis has originated a variety of papers and books, a production that has propitiated to the CIRCUS research group of FEF-UNICAMP a reference position in this area, including some contribution for state and federal public programs. Trying to give sequence to this new but promising research area, we propose a research with the goal to analyze the teaching of circus activities in Canadian schools, as Canada is a reference country in this field. In addition, we intend to systematically describe the pedagogical practices, to be shared by teachers themselves along with the experience produced in Brazil. The choice of Canadian schools can be justified by the pioneer research project developed by a group of Canadian Universities since 2012, named "Introduction of Circus Arts and its Impact on Physical Literacy, Creativity and Resilience" coordinated by Dr. Dean Kriellaars, supervisor of this project. (AU)