Sāsā: More Than Just a Dance

Abstract

The traditional Samoan dance, sasa, is familiar to many children and teachers in Aotearoa/New Zealand who have participated in or attended Pasifika cultural festivals and other school and community events. While sasa may be regarded as a source of entertainment with great audience appeal that integrates dance and music, its significance and potential as a multi-literacy and sociocultural learning context is often overlooked. As the authors of this paper, we argue that cultural experiences such as sasa are educational as well as artistic. This chapter explores the potential of sasa in education, informed by the merging and emerging perspectives of two authors from different cultural backgrounds who reflect on their own experiences and understandings. This paper also draws on narratives of a Samoan school principal and two pre-service education students. Some of the deeper social and historical features are discussed with a view to considering the sasa as a means of enhancing artistic, sociocultural and affective benefits for learners. We found that as students from different cultures engage in the process of creating and performing sasa, they construct their own meaning from the experience, bringing stories and characters to life through interplay of all the arts, particularly dance and music. However, before introducing cultural activities such as sasa to the classroom, it is important to determine how both cultural and educational practices can be honoured simultaneously. The authors draw on Bronfenbrenner's (The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979) ecological model to promote the idea that sasa has educational benefits for both Samoan and non-Samoan children, and that it is 'more than just a dance.' We pose a series of questions to challenge educators to consider how they might integrate cultural practices into their teaching and learning pedagogy.