Abstract:The examination of racist, normalized ideology within American education is not new. Theoretical and practical conceptions of social justice in education have attempted to attend to educational inequality. Oftentimes, these attempts have reinstated the status quo because they were framed within the same Eurocentric paradigm. To address this, Django Paris proposed culturally sustaining pedagogy as a means of empowering minoritized students by sustaining the cultural competence of their communities and dismantling coloniality within educational practices. He, Michael Domínguez, and others argue (...) that epistemic expansion is imperative for equitizing educational spaces and closing the ontological distance between teachers and students. Drawing from their work as well as scholarship from the fields of educational policy, urban education, Afrocentrism, and Indigenous studies, this paper seeks to expand the discussion about culturally relevant and responsive music education to account for students’ musical epistemologies and the ways in which “epistemic travel” might inform normalized musical practices. (shrink)

Abstract:Music educators and music education researchers often rely on the use of story when advocating for social change. We may use story to illustrate a need for resources, point to a systemic injustice, illustrate a need for policy change, or identify an exclusion. Allies often utilize stories of oppression to demonstrate the untenability of situations or dehumanization experienced by particular people or groups. Stories shared, in other words, typically describe difficult, oppressive, or traumatic situations that may accomplish advocacy or social (...) change goals but may also inadvertently reinscribe oppressive relations. This paper considers several questions in relation to this practice: What does it do for dominant group members to hear stories of marginalization? How can telling stories ultimately reinscribe oppression? How could individuals who offer their stories benefit from sharing? What educational value does telling stories offer? If storytelling carries potential for reinscribing oppression, how else might educators advocate to meet the needs identified? To theorize this type of storytelling, I put Martin Buber’s work on I-Thou in conversation with work of Homi Bhabha. Buber’s theorizing allows the consideration of different types of relations, while Bhabha provides ways to explore the effects of what Buber terms an I-It relationship on individuals subject to systemic oppression. Ultimately, I explore ways to recenter minoritized voices and examine how it might be possible to consider oppressive systems without acquiescing to the demand for story. (shrink)

Abstract:What forms of practices can we observe in music education settings? Is it always music just because there are instruments in the room and some sounds are produced or because we can identify some pieces of a musical work now and then? Or is it because the children are engaged in self-determined activities? Or does the verbalization of behavior in musical terms prove this to be musical practice? This and other thoughts that guided the initial interpretations in a teaching research (...) project based on video materials have shown to be fallacies during deeper analyses. Since the indicators that this paper argues to be fallacies seem to be quite common–some in participatory observation of music practice (reflective practice of music educators) and others in theoretical and research work on music education–the identification and reflection of these fallacies could be of general value for music education discourse and practice. Various examples demonstrate how undifferentiated or even fallacious interpretations of practices in music education settings can undermine possibilities for aesthetic experience and musical practice. The paper argues that the necessary differentiation in observation depends on a reconsideration of philosophical questions and concepts from the past. (shrink)

Abstract:In 1952, John Cage wrote 4′33″ which famously asked the performer not to play a single note: tacet. This provocative work raises a number of questions. In music—and by extension, music education—what does it mean to not do something? What does it mean to make no sound? More fundamentally, what is the nature of non-action, non-sound, and even nothingness in and of itself? Since Cage was influenced by Eastern philosophy, we journey to Asia in search of insights into nothingness and (...) associated notions of absence and negation. In particular, we draw on the writings of Daoist philosophers, principally Laozi, to examine a quartet of philosophical terms, namely, wu (nothing/ness), wuwei (non-action), wusheng (non-sound), and wuaile (neither sorrow nor joy). Using these ideas, we propose a Daoist-inspired philosophy of music education, one that emphasizes the usefulness (yong) of nothingness (wu). (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper, we explore challenges in conveying the culturally constructed meanings of local Indigenous musics and the worldviews they manifest to students in K-12 school music classes, when foundational aspects of the English language, historical and current discourse, and English language habits function to thwart the transmission of those meanings. We recount how, in settler colonial societies in North America, speakers of the dominant English language have historically misrepresented, discredited, and obscured cultural meanings that inhere in local Indigenous musics. (...) First, we examine three ways in which the use of English has distorted the cultural meanings of those musics. Next, we explain how historical discourses in English have intentionally undervalued or discredited the values intrinsic to those musics, also describing how some current music education discourse in English might work against the embedding of Indigenous meanings in school music education settings. We then consider additional factors distinguishing Indigenous languages from European languages (especially English) to show how a people’s “language habits” influence their perception of and thus their relationship with their natural environment. We conclude by considering the role of music education in revitalizing local Indigenous languages and musics and advancing the cultural values of their originating communities. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay explores performance-driven aspects of U.S. bands in the contexts of Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jacques Derrida’s Aporias, and the author’s experience teaching both elementary general music and beginning band. The author wonders what band education might look like when the profession’s fixation on futuristic performances and allegiances to past traditions are laid aside; the article proposes that the profession of band might benefit from a more present-focused, process-oriented approach (...) to making music, akin to that of the general music classroom setting. The author advocates for a deeper engagement in critical dialogue around the role tradition plays in current band education practices in ways that reach toward inclusive, present-focused music making. (shrink)