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Since 2015 many postgraduate dance students from the Beijing Dance Academy China, have completed a one-year Masters in Community Dance at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. This paper reflects on eight student's experience of their year of international study. Data gathered through semi structured interviews were examined through the threshold concept theory and we found that these students were challenged by teacher/learner relationships, academic research in dance studies, and classroom communications. The article makes recommendations to both the Beijing Dance Academy and the University of Auckland as this academic partnership matures. While this study is specific only to the two institutions involved in the research, it may provide insights that are common across other tertiary dance programmes for international dance students.

As arts educators, we are concerned that the teaching and learning of the arts is remaining static within New Zealand primary school classrooms. Despite acceptance of research promoting the importance of arts education for students; a clear and valued arts curriculum in New Zealand since 2000; and, UNESCO policy strongly advocating for the role of arts education, there remains a relatively minimal implementation of arts education in New Zealand primary classrooms. Our research examines a proposition that in order to provide the benefits of an arts education to children in what is a crowded curriculum, generalist teachers may need to focus on teaching the arts across the curriculum. Informing this proposal is the ongoing government policy focus on literacy and numeracy. This article documents a research project that examined how the arts were and were not being taught across the curriculum by one teacher in one primary school in New Zealand.

This article speaks to classroom reality issues that may supersede any ideals, funding and expectations. We document a journey regarding the implementation of arts integration for six teachers in a small rural school in New Zealand. Arts Integration is a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning that employs arts activities to teach concepts in other subject areas where the focus is on the arts learning processes that are transferable across different disciplines and less so on the artistic product. Our definition aligns with that of the John F. Kennedy Center 'Arts Integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form'. Arts Integration can be a difficult concept to understand and for teachers who have possibly avoided teaching any arts subjects in the past, it is a whole new pedagogical approach to teaching. All is laid bare as we document our research in an attempt to understand and share the reality of the difficulties that are involved in such an undertaking. We identify some of the issues that 'bit' us as we pursued a research project rich in pedagogical potential and full of threats concerning issues around change in the classroom.

Examining practice, within education, is complex and never straightforward. It is not a surprise that when we conduct research, we discover new and contrary meanings. For the last 16 months we have been examining different means for supporting teaching and learning of the arts in primary schools. Our aim was to better understand how to teach the arts across the curriculum. We made a plan, we gained ethical approval, found several schools to work with, and interviewed teachers and principals. Our research has a specific interest in documenting and understanding how the arts are taught across the curriculum. We were most interested in working with teachers, principals and children who were implementing an "arts across the curriculum programme". In short, what we found was that teachers, principals, curriculum and us, all had different meanings of what was meant by teaching the arts across the curriculum.

New Zealand primary school teachers have access to a comprehensive arts curriculum that includes dance, drama, music, and visual arts. This research focused on several teachers' reality of implementing the dance curriculum in New Zealand primary schools, drawing on Snook's (2012) study in this field. Our research valued the voices of teachers, principals, and parents. We found that the primary school teachers in this study lacked experience in teaching dance, manifesting as a lack of confidence to teach dance in their classrooms. The teachers spoke to the practice of bringing in dance experts to kick start, support, develop, and mentor dance programs in their schools. A surprising, yet clear finding from our study was that a teacher's preexisting lack of confidence in teaching dance might be compounded by the visit of an expert. This statement raises several issues regarding artists in schools programs in New Zealand that are examined in this article.

This paper reflects upon international arts education action and relative local in-action. The first half of the paper provides a brief narrative of the World Alliance for Arts Education's advocacy work and the development of the UNESCO Seoul Agenda: Goals for the development of arts education. The second half of the paper highlights a dance education research project in New Zealand that relates to strategies and actions noted within the Seoul Agenda. This dance education research reveals both the power and impotence of policies and events such as the Seoul Agenda and International Arts Education Week. The research reveals that when you step off the global stage and turn to your own backyard, reality strikes hard. Arts education is valued, yet relatively few teachers, fewer schools and even fewer governments are actually willing to fully realise the potential of arts education. Arts education for all the rhetoric lacks commitment and investment. Using dance education as a lens, this research examines what teachers in New Zealand are doing in their classrooms and what this means for local communities, teachers, schools, teacher education institutions, advocacy and support organisations, then provides suggestions so that dance and other arts can fulfil their potential.