Abstract
What kind of student teaching seminar best helps preservice teachers prepare for a job in the field? Here are some ideas to consider.
Photo of Juliet Hess by Harley Seeley.
You are reading the first iteration of a new occasional feature in Music Educators Journal called “Equity in Music Education.” This section in MEJ represents a commitment in music education to issues of equity and social justice. In highlighting and prioritizing equity in our field, we as music educators demonstrate a firm commitment to serve the diverse student populations of the United States and other parts of the world. Through this series, we ask some important questions: “Why prioritize equity and social justice in this moment?” “How do these ideals connect to music teaching and learning?” and “What does social justice look like practically in the classroom?”
According to Brazilian educator and author Paulo Freire, teaching is always, first and foremost, a political act. 1 Selecting repertoire, learning goals, and the strategies we will use in teaching reflect our values as teachers, cultural backgrounds, and lived experiences. We transmit these values through teaching, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly.
Operating on the understanding that all teaching is political presents us with the opportunity to deeply reflect on our values. It gives us a reason to question what we teach in new ways by asking such questions as “What do we wish to communicate in our pedagogy?” Our values as teachers will be reflected in the classroom. As educators, then, we have the opportunity to be intentional about it. What values do we hold dear that align with social justice?
To consider alignments with social justice, we must first consider its definition. Social justice is a slippery term: Music education researcher Roger Mantie argues that rather than defining it, individuals are more apt to simply point to instances of social justice as they occur. 2 I draw on music education scholar Lise Vaugeois’s working definition of social justice—enacted as a verb rather than a noun. Vaugeois contends that social justice (as a verb) is “the work of undoing structures that produce raced and gendered oppressions and systemic poverty as well as the work of challenging discourses that rationalize these structures.” 3 I would extend her definition to include oppressions on the basis of any aspect of identity. Using her definition, social justice becomes the work of challenging structures that oppress. These structures might include, for example, government funding decisions that severely impact resources available to schools.
In reflecting on matters of equity and social justice, we should consider all forms of oppression that students face in their daily lives and work to challenge them through our classroom environments, teaching strategies, and even the repertoire we select to teach. We might deliberate over how best to include students’ own affinities, passions, and experiences into the very curriculum of our classroom. We also might ask whether our programs challenge institutional structures that harm children, even if the harm is covert. As educators, we can also consider carefully the values that align with social justice.
Practically, I suggest that there are a number of ways that we can enact principles of social justice in the classroom. Schools, historically and currently, are often part of the system that constructs barriers that impede students of color and students who deal with systemic poverty from easily succeeding in school. 4 In looking to undo the structures that oppress young people, we can shape a curriculum and a pedagogy that purposefully places classroom musics alongside students’ own musics, experiences, and interests. For example, a whole-school curriculum that features the achievements of white American or Western European men unintentionally limits the number of students who can see themselves reflected in the school. Music teachers can challenge that practice by consciously seeking out content and teaching strategies that extend ideas of who participates in music.
First, we might work to enact culturally responsive teaching—an approach that music education researchers Vicki Lind and Constance McKoy outline beautifully in theory and practice for music education. They note that students must have “opportunities to engage with music in ways that are congruent with their own lived cultural experiences with music.” 5 In music class, that may mean that we broaden our program to include the musics deeply valued by the children we teach and that our selection of musics should change every year as we continue to meet different student populations with ever-evolving tastes and interests. It may also mean that we draw on the rich musical practices that students enact outside of school. If they engage in complex informal practices of music learning such as producing hip-hop tracks, playing in drum circles, or performing in mariachi bands, we might engage such practices in schools, as music education scholar Lucy Green suggests, 6 so that our program uses pedagogy that draws on formal and informal learning strategies and both written notation and aural learning. Alongside a traditional ensemble practice, for example, we might encourage a thriving hip-hop songwriting program.
We can be very intentional to communicate to students that they are of value as individuals. The institution of school (all types of schools) often marginalizes individuals. As teachers, we can work to counter the message sent by the institution. When we ask about and teach musics that students care about deeply, we communicate that we value their experiences and their passions. We can provide students with meaningful opportunities to contribute and lead the class and prioritize hearing from as many voices as possible.
We can also work to contextualize all musical material in the class, exploring, for example, the history and importance of mariachi and other musics relevant to our specific communities. In providing a rich sociohistorical context for all musics studied, we model ways that students can connect musical practices to lived experiences. This means students should learn more than dates of composition and the name of the culture; they should learn why the music was created and for whom. Music-making and creating then become human practices in which students may see themselves as well as the music they learn. Considering the history and the political contexts that surround all musics, students also learn that no music exists in a vacuum—that every song has a story. We might also lead them to think critically about which stories have been prioritized in schools—not to dismiss these stories but to understand how we may come to hear certain stories over others.
In contextualizing in this way, we further teach students to think critically about material through example. Thinking about whose stories are privileged is an important beginning in the process of asking who is missing from the repertoire we teach and explore in music class. The process of asking questions about how we choose repertoire is less about curricular transformation and more about urging students to develop a practice of “noticing”—noticing whose musical practices are present, whose are absent, what music is missing. Noticing in this way encourages students to identify which musical practices and musics are absent from their school experiences and challenge the school system to explicitly meet their needs.
We might extend the work of thinking critically to acknowledge with the students that all teaching is political. Upon such acknowledgment, we can invite students to consider the intentions behind curricular goals in the classes they encounter in schools. This extends the pedagogy of noticing to invite students to notice the intentions present in all curricula and analyze how the curricula they encounter throughout their school years both serve and fail to serve their needs. How does a program that emphasizes learning to read musical notation, for example, set students up for future success in music? How does the same program place limitations on students whose predominant chosen form of music-making is hip-hop production? We might emphasize music notation in our classes to ensure that students can continue in school music and attend a postsecondary institution for music if they desire. In facilitating students to recognize the intent behind the curriculum, we open a space for them to articulate needs that the curriculum does not address and the opportunity to provide suggestions for additional material or musical practices.
We might also work to have a critical orientation to facilitating conversations—an approach that encourages students to ask those same questions about intentions, presences, and absences—focused on our own teaching. We can challenge students to notice absences and engage music critically. In facilitating discussions, we can use a critical orientation to push the conversation to a deeper level—a level that does not engage music and the purpose, goals, and content of curriculum superficially but deeply in a productive way.
Finally, we might seriously ponder ways to address the systemic issues that face the students with the larger network of teachers who teach in our school or perhaps throughout our local community. For example, in cases of student poverty, what might we, as teachers in an institution, put in place to address the specific socioeconomic issues that face our communities? We can work to identify the specific barriers students encounter and collectively think about tangible and structural ways to address these issues, even by engaging one issue at a time and monitoring for changes. Our communities are important resources in the work of social justice. Families may have creative solutions for systemic issues that simply require some institutional support.
Why does all this matter? When we engage students’ own music interests and experiences in the classroom, we communicate powerfully to students that their perspectives (and their musics) are valued and valuable. We communicate that their experiences should be present in their education experience. When we further assist students in developing the tools to critique—to notice absences and presences in the materials they encounter inside and outside school, we simultaneously help them develop skills to challenge systems, material, and media that exclude their lived experiences.
As music teachers, we are uniquely positioned to do this work. Music is an extraordinary medium for social justice. It facilitates personal and communal expression, storytelling, reflection, critical thinking, and creativity. Students can glimpse the world through music. In employing a social justice pedagogy for music education, we can help them challenge, critique, and shape both their world and their music in ways that help them express their ideas and tell their stories.
I invite you to contribute your perspective on equity and social justice in music education to this occasional column. If you have ideas to share, please submit your 1,500-word contribution to Music Educators Journal Academic Editor Katherine Strand and NAfME staff editor Ella Wilcox (