Chinese folk-dance education in higher education often focuses on technical mastery and performance, while cultural meaning, although emphasised in policy discourse, remains weakly embedded in actual curriculum and classroom practice. As a result, students can reproduce choreographic steps but often lack understanding of the narratives, values and emotions behind ethnic dance, which leads to low engagement, surface imitation and fragile cultural identity. This study therefore aimed to examine how cultural contexts can be pedagogically integrated into Chinese folk-dance curriculum design, using Mongolian and Tibetan dance as a qualitative case. The literature review drew on Self-Determination Theory, interest development, contextual teaching and learning, culturally responsive pedagogy and recent work on Chinese ethnic dance education, and showed that existing studies highlight motivation, context and heritage preservation but provide limited design-level guidance for culturally embedded curricula. A qualitative, interpretive, single instrumental case study approach was adopted. Purposive sampling was used to identify information-rich participants, resulting in a sample of 25 university students, 6 Chinese folk-dance teachers and 3 external experts in dance education and intangible cultural heritage. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with all groups and pre-teaching classroom observations, using an interview protocol refined through face, content, construct and language validity checks and a pilot test. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis with both deductive and inductive coding, and trustworthiness was enhanced through triangulation, audit trails, thick description and reflexive journaling. The analysis identified six design imperatives for culturally embedded pedagogy: meaning before mechanics, scaffolded pacing, somatic security and recovery, concrete embodied anchors, structured peer scaffolding and guided authorship. Three cultural mechanisms were theorised: cultural context as an emotional catalyst, an “emotion–action–meaning” pathway and cultural understanding as a process of identity construction, which informed a five-stage culturally embedded teaching framework. The study reconceptualises culture as the organising mechanism of folk-dance pedagogy and offers concrete curriculum principles and a multi-stage model for culturally embedded design. Future research should test and refine this framework across other ethnic dance forms and institutions, use mixed-method and longitudinal designs, and examine teacher professional development and students’ ethical engagement with cultural difference.
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