DANC 3400

This course was so interesting! It was a mix of an anthropology culture class with a dance modern history class. The readings and lectures sometimes went over my head, but Katie did her best to explain technical/academic terms and how they are interpreted.

This course was challenging but really rewarding. I highly recommend it if you are interested in the anthropology of dance, we learned a lot about the role dance plays in a huge variety of cultures and it truly opened my perspective greatly. You also do not have to have a huge knowledge of dance to gain from this class. We got to have a few dance classes and met some really cool people who have special insight into what we learned.

I made an account specifically to write this review because of how unbelievably frustrating this class was. I had a 97 going into the final and ended up with an A- because the professor graded the final paper like it was a grad-level research thesis. Every single citation was nitpicked to an extreme degree—in a dance class. It was rigid, unforgiving, and completely disconnected from the creative and reflective nature the course claimed to encourage.
What made it worse was that the expectations clearly shifted at the very end of the semester. The structure and tone of the class up until the final suggested a focus on thoughtful engagement, not hypertechnical perfection. But the final was graded as if we were in a citation boot camp. The grading was punitive and felt completely out of proportion to the course material.
I’ve never been this disappointed by a class that should have been enriching. The entire experience left me discouraged and angry, and it unnecessarily hurt my GPA over arbitrary technicalities.