Support received and academic expectations of the students of Professional Dance Education

Abstract

The students who study the Professional Dance Education must balance it with mandatory Secondary Education and High School. The objective of this paper is to learn the degree of support received by the students from their family and academic environment in their Professional Dance Studies; further, the paper attempts to identify if there was a correlation between the level of studies of the parents and the advice that they would give to their children about the continuity or abandonment of the dance studies and to analyse whether said advice is correlated with the students expectations about their future. The research was carried out by means of a questionnaire prepared by the authors. Taken by 315 students between 14 and 37 years old, it was a varied sample, with students belonging to all different specialties that are studied in the Andalusian Professional Dance Conservatories. The results show a significant degree of support from the parents, in most cases parents are recommending to balance dance studies with another university degree. It was also observed from mothers in particular, where a mother had pursued higher education in their past, they were more encouraging of their children pursuing both degrees simultaneously. In contrast, the level of support received by the professors of the dance conservatory turned out to be moderately scarce, and very low in the case of the professors of other degrees.