Abstract
This article seeks to characterize culturally responsive teaching; consider how it differs from other pedagogical approaches in music education informed by culture, such as multicultural music education; and offer ideas for making the general music classroom more culturally responsive.
On a visit to a general music classroom, I was intrigued— but not necessarily surprised—by a bulletin board titled “Music of Peru,” which included a map of South America, images of the Andes and folk and popular instruments of the region, names of songs, and pictures of Peruvian musicians and folklorists. The music teacher explained to me that her fifth-grade students were in the middle of a unit on music of Peru. Students were learning to sing “El Humahuaqueño,” listening to Susana Baca and Peru Negro perform, building Siku-style panpipes, performing Orff arrangements of “Mi Palomita” using panpipes and assorted percussion instruments, and contextualizing the music culturally and historically. The components of this thoughtfully planned unit seemed to be informed by and a product of the multicultural music education movement.
As I imagined how the lessons in this unit were being brought to life in the classroom, I wondered how students would make sense of the music experiences and how these experiences might connect with their lives. Was the teacher acting in a culturally responsive way because she designed an interesting unit around music of Peruvian origins? Was the teacher acting in a culturally responsive way because many of her students were Spanish speakers and some were Peruvian? What does it mean to be culturally responsive? In this article, I seek to characterize cultural responsive teaching, consider how it is differs from other pedagogical approaches in music informed by culture (i.e., multicultural music education), and offer ideas for making the general music classroom more culturally responsive.
Culturally Responsive Teaching
Culture is a complex social process that constitutes an entire way of life as well as the things people produce, transmit, and consume (Apple, 1986). It can include, but is not limited to, ethnicity and race, national origin, and native language. It is dynamic, multidimensional, learned, socially constructed, and influenced by sociopolitical factors (Nieto, 1999). As an omnipresent phenomenon, it seems logical that culture should inform teachers’ interactions and engagements with students, as well as their curricular designs (Banks, 2006; Erickson, 2004; Gay, 2000). Culturally responsive teaching 1 is an approach to teaching that considers the role of culture in every aspect of teaching and learning so that student learning is made more relevant, meaningful, and effective (Delpit, 1995; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 2009).
Culturally responsive teaching is based on constructivist theories of learning, which view learning as dependent on social interactions and learners’ cultural frames and lived experiences (Villegas & Lucas, 2007). The education scholar, Geneva Gay (2002), characterized cultural responsive teaching as pedagogy that validates and affirms students’ cultural backgrounds, while teaching to and through their diverse strengths and lived experiences. Ladson-Billings (2009) contends that culturally relevant teaching “empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impact knowledge, skills and attitudes” (p. 20). Teachers who are culturally responsive see students as members of extended cultural circles that exist beyond the classroom, into their homes and communities (Ladson-Billings, 2009). In so doing, teachers are better prepared to select relevant materials, resources, and instructional strategies and help build connections between home and school, the abstract and concrete.
In characterizing culturally responsive teaching, Gay (2010) outlined five major reasons it is validating and affirming to students:
It acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups, both as legacies that affect students’ dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum.
It builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstractions and lived sociocultural realities.
It uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles.
It teaches students to know and praise their own and one another’s cultural heritages. (pp. 31-32)
It incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools.
Ladson-Billings (2009), offers studying successful a way of thinking about, recognizing, and enacting culturally responsive teaching in the classroom. These ideas resulted from studying successful teachers of African American students. These teachers demonstrated various characteristics that she categorized into three broad themes:
View themselves as artists rather than technicians
See themselves as part of and contributors to the community
Believe all students are capable of success
Help students make connections from the community to the global levels
See teaching as drawing out knowledge rather than putting in knowledge
Connect with all students
Create fluid relations with students that extend beyond the classroom, into the home and community
Build a community of learners
Help students learn collaboratively
Understand that knowledge is not fixed, but continuously changing, recreated, and shaped by teachers and students
Help students view knowledge critically
Demonstrate passion for content and subject
Help students develop skills
Hold high standards while recognizing the complexities of standards, and cultural diversity, and individuality into
Recall for a moment the Peruvian music unit briefly described in the opening, in light of these characteristics and the aforementioned descriptions. In so doing, you will realize it is difficult to know if the unit is culturally responsive. The description of its content only holds potential for being culturally responsive. To be culturally responsive would require a contextual understanding of the school where it was being realized and the students who would partake in the planned experiences, as well as a window into social interactions within the classroom.
Responding to Culture in General Music
General music teachers have considered culture in the curriculum since the beginnings of music education. The inclusion of European classical music for listening or Christian hymns for singing in school music programs were culturally-positioned decisions, whether deliberately or unconsciously. In more recent decades, the inclusion of songs from diverse musical cultures and countries was a more deliberate effort to include music in the curriculum that represented cultural and musical diversity (Campbell, 2002). Over the years, many efforts have been made to help teachers select music of diverse cultures thoughtfully (e.g., Abril, 2006), to contextualize the music by making inter- and intradisciplinary connections (e.g., Schippers, 2010), and design culture-specific and cross-cultural units (e.g., Anderson & Campbell, 2010). This seems to have become the norm, as evidenced in general music textbooks, resources, workshops, and classroom practices. The culture-specific unit on Peruvian music is a prime example, with visible markers of culture—songs, images, history, geography, and recordings—serving as the primary content.
Pedagogy, a less visible aspect of culture, is another way that music educators have responded to culture. Knowing it is impossible for a teacher to be skilled in the musical traditions of many cultures, the use of culture bearers, recordings, videos and other forms of multimedia has been recommended (Campbell, 2004) and put into practice (see Bartolome, 2010; Boshkoff & Gault, 2010). In Lessons from the World, Campbell (1991) examined the ways in which music is transmitted in various cultures and helped educators think about ways to make their classroom pedagogies more congruent with the ways in which the music is taught and learned in a given culture. Although these pedagogical approaches take culture into account, they mostly do so in relation to the content—music and materials. The item missing from many conversations about multicultural music education and its practices was the culture of the students being taught. Culturally responsive teaching helps move the attention from the things we teach to the children we teach and the social learning environment where music experiences occur.
Toward a More Culturally Responsive General Music Classroom
How might a general music teacher move forward in creating a classroom and teaching practices that are culturally responsive?
See and Know Students
To be culturally responsive, it is essential that teachers see and know their students both as individuals and as members of extended social circles. This knowledge better prepares teachers to respond by planning for instruction, building on students’ strengths, and providing relevant stories and examples during instruction. Teachers can come to know students by opening spaces in the classroom for students’ stories to be told and musical voices to be heard. Teachers might ask students to write about their musical backgrounds, skills, preferences, and experiences. Students can blog about the music they listen to in class or at home, review their favorite new recording, or draw an image of their musical worlds (see Lum & Campbell, 2009). Projects such as these provide students with opportunities to apply their understanding of music terminology and reflect on their musical identities, among other things. They also provide teachers with a way to know their students better.
It is important to see students as valued members of the learning community, bringing their unique backgrounds, perspectives, knowledge, and skills. From a deficit perspective, students of diverse cultural groups are seen as impoverished, lacking familial support, language skills, and/or essential knowledge (Banks, 2006). Teachers who see their students in such a way are thought to have lower expectations and inadvertently interact with students in ways that hamper learning (Villegas & Lucas, 2007). The vast majority of children arrive in the music classroom with rich musical experiences, although in many cases, these experiences might be incompatible with certain approaches and aims of music education. Nonetheless, the lullabies their mothers sang, the game songs they played, and the music they heard and danced to at family gatherings are an important part of who these children are when they come into the music classroom (see Ilari, 2009).
Create a Social Learning Community
Seeing and knowing students are essential to building a vibrant learning community in the classroom, where students’ knowings and lived experiences are used as tools to improve learning for all. Students may have a more nuanced understanding of the music being performed in class, at least from their positions as children or adolescents and/or as members of a given cultural group (Abril, 2009). Affording the space for collaboration, discussion, questioning, and analyzing can lead to a deepened understanding of the music and recognition that interpretations of the music are varied and fluid, dependent on context and perspective (Abril, 2010). Teachers should also work to include the specific experiences of students in the class rather than teaching concepts and skills in a cultural vacuum. In a social learning community, students are partners with teachers in learning rather than mere recipients of knowledge and information.
Recognize Multiple Perspectives and Positions
One of the principles of culturally responsive teaching is clarifying for students that there are multiple viewpoints and perspectives on the world and music. In the general music classroom, teachers can engage students in thinking about the meaning certain songs hold for individuals or groups of people. Students can write and share their opinions about a song the class is performing in an upcoming concert, revealing diverse viewpoints that might deepen understanding. Alternately, the class can engage in a project where they interview adults to reveal the meaning of songs such as the country’s national anthem or a popular song on the radio. In the Peruvian unit, the teacher might invite someone from the local community who plays the Siku or performs Peruvian folk styles of music to talk about and perform Peruvian music that is particularly meaningful to him or her. Students and teacher can also share the meaning derived from playing/singing the music from Peru within the unit. These conversations, questions, and experiences in the classroom can help students view knowledge critically, fluidly, and from multiple viewpoints.
Connect Beyond the Classroom
The disconnects between school music and life music have been well documented in the literature (Campbell, 2010; Kelly-McHale, 2011; Lum, 2007). In Campbell’s (2010) study of music in childhood, she described the case of one child who spoke of rap in the classroom as being decidedly different from real rap:
Children like Lateesha know the difference, however, describing the music class rendition as just “kinda rap” without a rhythmically complex underlay of sound and with a text that was innocuous, “safe,” and remote from the subjects and language of commercial rap. The rhythm and text distinguish real rap and the rhythmic speech “rap” of music class, which emanate from two different worlds. (p. 176)
In addition to noting the differences between the music of these two worlds, Kelly-McHale (2011) found disconnects between the ways children from diverse cultural backgrounds speak about the things they enjoy and learn from music in their lives and music in school. Discussions about music in school mostly hovered around musical elements and other concepts the teacher sought to teach; discussions about home music focused on emotions, feelings, stories, and associated actions or rituals. These two ways of learning about and talking about music are important and can be mutually informative. Culturally responsive teachers are able to help students make connections between the music being studied or performed in the classroom and the musical world beyond the classroom. For example, a teacher can make an explicit connection between the use of a given musical element (e.g., gradual crescendo) and the emotion that its use in a composition might evoke. In the Peruvian unit, students might examine how the different music studied in the classroom functions in Peru or elsewhere around the world, and then consider how the music they listen to at home functions in their lives.
Being culturally responsive includes helping students make connections from their community to the global level (Ladson-Billings, 2009) as well as valuing cultures of a wide variety of ethnic groups (Gay, 2010). A unit on music of a musical culture that is unfamiliar and distant to students (as Peru may have been to the teacher whose classroom I visited) may help make meaningful connections for individual students that relate to the community level. Students might be asked to research what local music festivals are coming to town that will include music of Peru or South America. At the end of the month-long unit on Peru, students could be asked to compose music fusing some of the instruments and stylistic elements of the Peruvian music they studied with their own musical voice.
Select Multicultural Music and Materials
Gay (2010) would remind us that we should incorporate multicultural materials, resources, and information in the subjects we teach on a routine basis. Doing so should be informed, in part, by the cultures of the students we teach. In a recent article, Shaw (2012) posed a series of questions that teachers might ask when selecting such materials for the classroom: “What music would build upon my students’ prior experiences? What pieces would capitalize on their cultural knowledge? What selections could my students experience through their preferred learning styles? Which would showcase their culturally informed performance styles?” (p. 76). Teachers selecting or preparing to use music in a culturally responsive classroom might pose these questions in planning for instruction. Note that these questions are centered on the students’ backgrounds, knowledge, experiences, and skills. This is not to say that teachers should do so without taking into account other important things, including musical elements, concepts, or thematic units.
Music selected for the culturally responsive classroom does not have to be representative of students’ cultures and ethnic heritages. Using music thought to be or actually from the cultural heritage of students is not always fail-proof. As obvious as it may seem, students and their families may not relate to songs just because they are sung in the native language or are from or thought to be from a given country. Contrived songs, stereotypical music selections, or exoticized portrayals of cultural groups are as insidious as not considering culture at all (see Abril, 2010; Kelly-McHale, 2011, for specific cases). Music and materials should be selected with integrity and sensitivity…, no matter the style, genre, or tradition (see Abril, 2006). For example, the unit on Peruvian music can be taught in a culturally responsive way in any school, with students of any cultural background, as long as the teacher assists students to make connections between their musical cultures and those beyond their experiences, and helping all students deepen their musical skills and understanding.
Conclusion
What does it mean to be culturally responsive in the general music classroom? Music teachers who seek to be more culturally responsive can begin by seeing and coming to know their students, acknowledging, understanding, and validating them as individuals and as members of extended and overlapping cultural circles. Teachers can respond to these understandings by creating social learning spaces from where students’ backgrounds and life experiences are drawn, as well as used as points of reference and resources so that learning is more effective for all students. Within these learning spaces, teachers can ask questions and engage students in music practices that help them understand how music is positioned and interpreted in diverse contexts. They can also find creative ways to help students make connections between music experiences in the classroom and those in their respective homes and communities. Finally, materials, music, and resources should be selected thoughtfully and with students’ cultures in mind. Choosing a song from South America to sing and playing an arrangement of a Peruvian song on Orff instruments, no matter how culturally valid or representative the music, is not, in itself, culturally responsive. Culturally responsive teaching requires an intense connection with and understanding of students so that teachers can act in ways that further their learning and deepen their understanding of music and the world around them.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.