Caroline Ribbers

Her passion for yoga and wish to share the (potential) benefits of yoga practice with dance students led Caroline to take several yoga teacher training courses, including with David Lurey (Vinyasa Yoga) and Gert van Leeuwen (Critical Alignment Yoga). Since 2011, she has been facilitating yoga for students of the Fontys Dance Academy. In this context, she also recently completed a PhD research. For this research, under the supervision of prof. dr. Barend van Heusden (University of Groningen), prof. dr. Nienke Nieveen (Technical University Eindhoven) and dr. Abby Hoffmann (University of Suffolk), she developed a yoga method for dance students. The method enables the students to become more aware and in charge of their embodied learning by engaging in meta-learning (or learning-about-learning). As a methodological framework for developing the yoga method, educational design research integrating various embodied research methods (such as meditation and yoga) was used.

 During her PhD study, Caroline became involved in the redesign of the Fontys Dance Academy curricula and in the international research network Designing Embodied Education in Dance (DEED), which examines how educational reform of dance within Higher Education can be driven by (principles of) embodied practice. She also supervises BA and MA students researching the relationship between dance and embodied practice, and explores, through small-scale projects, how the findings of her doctoral research can be further disseminated.