Practice-Led Knowledge Transmission in Thai Classical Dance: The C-RITE Model

Abstract

Thai classical dance holds embodied cultural knowledge, and universities are responsible for passing it on. That charge has grown harder: technology turns over fast, students arrive from very different backgrounds, and much of what must be taught is tacit, even sacred, and resists being put into words. This study asks one question: how do undergraduate Thai dance students transmit knowledge as they create choreography, rehearse it, and teach it to other performers? A working model is built from the answer. The fieldwork ran for one four-month semester and drew on five sources simultaneously: in-depth interviews, focus groups, observation of classes and rehearsals, questionnaires, and a reading of documents. Fifty second-year students participated, along with eight expert instructors from three universities. Coding was hybrid: an initial scheme came from the study’s frameworks, open coding let new categories surface, and ratings from evaluation forms and brief expert panels were read qualitatively rather than statistically. Experiential, practice-led learning anchored the analysis; four further lenses entered only where each earned its place, namely constructivist and social learning, developmental sequencing through Multiple Intelligences and Bloom’s taxonomy, affective work from the Stanislavski system and theories of belief in art, and information-processing models. Nine student choreographies were used as cases. Five themes emerged: transmission shifted from memorizing steps to making meaning; student-creators became transmitters of embodied knowledge; technology, mostly rehearsal video, supported reflection without becoming the authority; and sacredness and contemporaneity pulled against each other. The strands met in the C-RITE model (Create, Rehearse, Interpret, Transmit, Evaluate), which ties reflection to Thai aesthetic criteria, splits transmission and cultural interpretation into separately assessable stages, and pins each stage to concrete evidence. The hardest problems were three: holding sacredness and contemporaneity together, the limits of technology, and recording tacit knowledge in a form that can be taught and checked by others. Future research should follow the model over longer spans and in other institutions and dance traditions to test how durable and transferable its effects are. The paper closes with practical strategies for keeping the transmission of Thailand’s performing arts heritage culturally grounded.