RESEARCH PROJECTS

LIBERATORY AND ANTI-OPPRESSIVE TEACHER EDUCATION

In addition to teaching from an abolitionist, liberatory stance, Alexia is also engaging in research-based writing projects (solo and collaborative) exploring these concepts of praxis into teacher education in dance, early childhood, and elementary education. 

In 2022, Alexia has at least three collaborative writing projects across the fields of dance education, arts integration, and faculty learning communities on the topics of somatic social justice, anti-oppression, and decolonization. Some of these writing projects have been adapted from/for national and international conferences. Stay tuned!

​

At the end of 2021, Alexia received a grant from The Abolitionist Teaching Network to support her, in part, on a major writing project on liberatory curriculum design in dance education. Stay tuned!

In 2021, Alexia published two blogs on the topic of justice-orietned teacher education in contact improv and will be presenting at the CI@50 conference on this topic. 

​

In 2020, Alexia and one of her antiracist coalitions published a paper in The Activist History Review on how they as adjunct faculty were reimagining power and privilege through antiracist pedagogy.

BODY CONCEPT

Body Concept is a collaborative dance research project that explores the lived experiences of the dancers and choreographer in regards to a restorative justice of Body. This project emerged from Alexia's performative presentation at ICQI 2019 called A Restorative Justice for Body in Research Scholarship. Alexia worked with a trio of dancers from SUNY Brockport to further this work through dancer-generated movement, spoken word, and the visual arts. The choreography utilizes the experiences of the dancers as material, as they explored their conceptions and identity as/with Body through reflective and creative visual arts, movement, and words. The conceptions of Body generated by the dancers are performed in relation to their Body-mapped costumes, their inner experiences, and their relationships with one another.

​

This research project has been performed at New Dancers Showcase at SUNY Brockport in 2019 and was accepted to be performed at the 2020 BMCA conference in Geneva, NY and Dances at MUCC festival in Rochester, NY June 2020.

​

This project was funded in part through an Undergraduate Faculty Mini Grant through SUNY Brockport.

SOMATIC MOVEMENT LITERACY

Somatic Movement Literacy (SML) is a concept that Alexia has been mapping on to her previous research findings regarding young children's development and experiences with mindfulness and movement practices. SML is influenced by Paul Linden's (1994) framework of somatic literacy that he proposed for integrating somatic education into physical education. Alexia has been presenting her research-based understanding of how SML can be fostered within early childhood somatic/dance education at conferences nationally and internationally. 

​

This research has been published in the journal Research in Dance Education (2021). It's also been presented at national and international conferences, including the virtual Bodily Learning conference "in" Trondheim, Norway (2021), the digital SUNY Cortland Literacy Department Conference (2021), and the joint conference of NDEO and ISMETA in New York City (2019).

ARTS-BASED RESEARCH METHODS

Alexia has integrated her training in qualitative methods of research with her professional training with dance, somatics, and mindfulness in her approach to arts-based research (ABR). Alexia has developed a studio practice of bodily writing to both analyze and interpret data, which she follows with a performative inquiry, where an audience is invited to view the choreographed findings from the perspective of co-researchers. She has conducted her own ABR and is a part of a multi-institutional ABR team where she collaborates on her and her team members' research and inquiries. 

​

Alexia has co-authored a publication on these methods in 2017 in IJEA. She has performatively presented these methods in solo and with her team at AIRG (2020), AERA (2017, 2019), and at the World Conference on Movement and Cognition (2018).