Double honours for Nicholas Rowe

Dr Nicholas Rowe, a senior lecturer in Dance Studies at The University of Auckland, has snapped up two prestigious awards recognising both his teaching and research achievements.

Each year the University selects a number of academic staff who have distinguished themselves through the excellence of their teaching.

The University also gives an annual award of $25,000, towards continued research, to six staff who have demonstrated early in their careers – the outstanding quality of their research.

Of all the comments from all the students who have praised the teaching of Nicholas Rowe, there is one short sentence that says it all: “[We want] Nick teaching more of our classes,” wrote one anonymous student in an evaluation.

Nicholas believes “that education is most effective when it is social and fun.  Social because we gather as a class for so brief a time in our long professional lives, we need to get the most out of everyone present. Fun, because the most important thing in learning is curiosity, and curiosity flourishes when students are playful and enthused.”

His students and others who have experience of his work seem to agree that his approach has great power. “He brings a special gift to what he does here,” said Carla Peterson on Dancing for Hope, a documentary about Nicholas’s teaching work (over an eight-year period) in refugee camps in Palestine and Lebanon, “because he has both his own intelligence in terms of how he works with the children and the youth, but also the fact that he brings great joy to it is really sensed by everyone that he is working with.”

As a senior lecturer in Dance Studies, Nicholas has been responsible for redesigning and delivering seven undergraduate and four postgraduate courses in dance technique, choreography, research methods, writing and technology, and designing and introducing three new papers, including a 200-level General Education paper on dance in cultural contexts, and two special topic papers.

Nicholas’s brilliantly innovative research, which has this year won him a highly prestigious Early Career Research Excellence Award, has focused on how dance can be used as a means of discovering and communicating relationships to people and place, to better reveal kinaesthetic and embodied knowledge.

He is currently looking at the ways in which dance can support cultural sustainability and political autonomy within traumatised communities. Later this year he will direct the Reclaiming Space Symposium in Christchurch, which is investigating how local dance teachers can be supported.

The University of Auckland’s National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries comprises the School of Architecture and Planning, Elam School of Fine Arts, the Centre for Art Research (CAR), the School of Music and the Dance Studies Programme.