About

Matthew Kenney Henley is an Associate Professor in the Dance Education Program and an Affiliated Researcher in the Arnhold Institute for Dance Education Research, Policy & Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research focuses on describing cognitive and social-emotional skills associated with dance education. He takes a phenomenological approach, analyzing how dancers in diverse communities describe the experience of learning concepts in the dance classroom. His interests include enactive cognition in the arts, developmental and neuroscientific approaches to embodied knowing, research methods for pedagogy, and the pedagogy of research methods. Henley earned his doctorate in Educational Psychology: Learning Sciences from the University of Washington, where he also completed an MFA in Dance. He previously served as an Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman's University, where he coordinated the B.A. program and taught in the M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs. His professional background includes dancing in New York City with Sean Curran Company and Randy James Dance Works.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Pedagogy
• Computer Science
• Library science
• Media studies
• Law
• Anthropology
• Developmental psychology
• History
• Epistemology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Making sense together: participatory sensemaking, learning cycles, and group roles

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2026-02-23

  articleOpen access

  The Kolb Learning Cycle is a popular model of experiential learning in which agents move through four phases: experimentation, concretization, observation, and conceptualization. This model is a dynamic learning model that aligns well with embodied approaches to cognition, as it centers on student agency, inquiry, and exploration. However, there is currently no 4E (embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended) account of the learning cycle. Furthermore, Kolb's theory focuses solely on behavior and learning in the individual. We here create a 4E account of the Kolb learning cycle by combining it with group role theory, ecological psychology, and participatory sense-making (PSM). We argue that, as individual members cycle through various group roles and their associated Kolb phases, they aid the group as a joint cognitive system in transitioning to new modes of engagement at the group level. Moving through group roles (leader, follower, naysayer, observer) often moves the agent into a new Kolb phase, which, in turn, changes the emergent dynamics of the entire group. Thus, social interaction can drive the learning cycle. Because the behavior of the individual is emergent, we cannot rely on reductivist accounts to explain group learning behaviors as the outcome of individual contributions. Rather, we consider the group as a cognitive system that drives learning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ways of knowing

  2025-09-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In practice, dancing is often experienced as what Sheets-Johnstone refers to as ekstatic, in which space and time are a multiple unity or unified multiplicity. Past, present, future, inside, outside, self, other, nature, spirit, breath, etc. are inextricably intertwined through an unfolding web of relationships. It is through inhabiting and exploring these relationships that dancing functions as a way of knowing and coming to know. Researching, as it is most commonly practiced in the academy, however, demands not only reflection, but objectification. Following the conceits of empiricism, social science research contends that we come to know the world by reducing experience into discrete parts which can be defined and measured. Hydrogen can be separated from oxygen. Cognition can be separated from emotion. Self can be separated from other. This chapter explores the tension between these two ways of knowing and coming to know through the lens of the author’s position advising doctoral level research in dance education. It describes pedagogical strategies to leverage the students’ lifetimes of experience as practitioners and some of the creative solutions developed in collaboration with students that hold space for both ways of knowing.

  PublisherDOI

• A Proposal for Developing Agency Through Self-Assessment in Dance Technique Class

  Dance Education in Practice · 2025-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Becoming Al-Sarab: A Dance Education Narrative

  Dance Chronicle · 2024-07-23 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Gripping the Landscape: Understanding Learning in Dance through the Skilled Intentionality Framework

  The International Journal of Arts Education · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Dance Teacher Education at Shiv Nadar Schools: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities

  Journal of Dance Education · 2024-09-24

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• This is a Course in Translation Not Imitation

  Journal of Dance Education · 2023-12-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this student reading, I use examples from dance technique classes to bring attention to the choices that students make when learning new movement via observation and repetition. Based on these examples, I frame learning in technique class not as a process of imitation but a process of translation. In doing so I hope to advocate for the intellectual practices and opportunities for student agency embedded in dance technique learning.

  PublisherDOI

• Mixing Methods and Approaches in Dance Education Research

  2023-03-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter defines mixed-methods research as empirical research involving both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. I suggest the difference between these two modes of inquiry is more than a difference in procedures. Rather, they each involve a different approach to knowledge generation; the former builds theory through an inductive approach and the latter tests theory through a deductive approach. The two approaches are illustrated through a description of my own ongoing multi-project sequential mixed-methods research on sensemaking in dance education. Across this research what is emerging is a view of dance education as a process of developing culturally situated shared patterns of attention through patterned physical practices.

  PublisherDOI

• Scaffolded Writing Assignments for Dance

  Dance Education in Practice · 2023-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  AbstractIn this article I share a series of writing assignments that were developed over a decade of working with general education students and dance majors at the tertiary level to guide their skills in describing and analyzing dancing. Across this curricular development, I sought to discretize the processes of describing, analyzing, and interpreting dances into smaller, more manageable skills that could be scaffolded over the course of a semester. I share eleven assignments that I have used throughout a semester and suggest in-class activities to prepare students to be successful in the assignments. I encourage readers to think critically and creatively about adopting and modifying the framework presented here to help students in their classes develop skills for clear and rich communication about dance and dance education. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSMy thanks to Jen Salk and Rhonda Cinotto, with whom I began this process of creating prompts and assignments to develop student writing skills about dance.

  PublisherDOI

• A Creative Workbook for Rehearsing Ethics, Orientations, and Practices

  2023-03-03

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this workbook, we provide the reader with activities for deepening research ethics, orientations, and practices. For use by researchers as well as in the teaching of research methods, these activities encourage the development of processes that cultivate modes of participation conducive to research, and that guide decisions about methodological design and enactment. Activities include opportunities to move, write, draw, discuss, etc. that can be used by any dance researcher when designing a new project. The activities could be done individually, in a formal classroom setting, or among an informal group of people at the same stage of the research process. We encourage users to see activities in the workbook as porous, malleable, and interconnected.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rosemary Candelario

  5 shared

• Matthew Brown

  Royal Marsden Hospital

  4 shared

• Roxaneh Zarnegar

  University College London

  4 shared

• Susan Mallett

  University of Nottingham

  2 shared

• Ahilan Pathmanathan

  East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust

  2 shared

• Victoria Tidman

  University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

  2 shared

• Anne Riddell

  2 shared

• Lynnette Young Overby

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Educational Psychology, Learning Sciences and Human Development

  University of Washington

• Other, Dance

  University of Washington

• Other, Dance

  University of Arizona

• B.A., Religious Studies

  University of Arizona