This is a video of one of my students at a large, diverse, community college in Southern California reading from her Dance Ethnography Paper on a community of practice. Attached is the assignment.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T03PtwPjbAT4d6VF7Huj5GuVfhDBb9jciMgJdktf03g/edit?usp=sharing

I give this assignment in order to emphasize the crucial importance of bodies in all types of cultural practice: what our bodies are doing tells us what a given culture values. The connection between bodily practice and cultural values is foundational to all of my dance history teaching. The students need to identify a local "community of practice" i.e. a gym, a dance studio, a retail outlet, a church, etc. and observe the community for 12 hours over the semester. They then write a paper that summarizes their findings. In this clip a woman reads a beautiful section from her study of her own very large multi-denominational Christian church. This video captures the realizations she finds in flipping from "inside" to "outside" the culture. 

https://vimeo.com/81528482