This thesis focuses on the Finnish Upper Secondary School Senior Dance event. The purpose of this study was to examine the students’ experiences and the meanings of The Finnish Upper Secondary School Senior Dance course and the Senior Dance event in Tampere Arts-Oriented Senior Secondary School at the beginning of the 2020s.

The present study is a case study based on the inquiry made for students of Tampere Arts-Oriented Senior Secondary School in autumn 2022. The students were asked about the many aspects of the Senior Dance Event, for example, their feelings and experiences concerning the event in general, its meanings for their life, the dances and how they felt about the event’s heteronormative nature. The Students’ Own Dance, which is a somewhat new tradition related to the event and its sexuality along with the Senior Dance event’s general heteronormativity were a few of the main subjects in this study. The results were analyzed applying phenomenographic method. This thesis also includes a short review on the history of the Upper Secondary School Senior Dance Event and how the event has changed since its beginning in the 1930s.

The findings of the present study suggest that the students in the 2020s find the Senior Dance Event meaningful and important. The event plays a big role in their secondary school years and it is also an important communal experience for them. The students want the tradition to stay mainly the same as it has been for decades, although they welcome the changes related to the gender roles in dancing and dressing up. Students feel that the atmosphere in their school is relatively tolerant and open minded when it comes to expressing one’s own gender, also in the Senior Dance Event.

One of the main findings of this study was that students prefer the use of gender neutral terms ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ when teaching couple dances, instead of calling them ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. Labeling the students boys or girls sustains the heteronormative nature of the event, which some of the students find outdated and disturbing.