Music Education Particularities

The phenomenon of creativity has long captivated the attention of music educators, and composing and improvising figure prominently in contemporary K-12 curricular standards. Likewise, questions of culture have surfaced in the field via movements of multiculturalism, social justice, and efforts in education at large on matters of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. Yet the realms of composition and diversity issues, though weighty with promise for integration, are more frequently found moving on parallel rather than intersecting tracks. In music education, “creative thinking in music,” as advanced by Peter Webster, launched a full attention to the possibilities of creative musical expression in the curriculum (Webster, 2009). Research led to policy and practice, and fueled a concerted effort to probe the intellectual process of musical invention as naturally evolving from children as well as teachable through a pedagogical sequence.

An impressive extent of published research is available on developmental levels of increasingly sophisticated musical invention, as is a host of practical articles that describe, deconstruct, and provide practical exercises in the fostering of the creative musical impulse. “Musical creativities” have turned up within the processes of composition, improvisation, songwriting, and even the art of personal interpretation (Burnard, 2012), and pronouncements of classroom creative music-making experiences send the message that all students can compose when given the opportunity to do so.

While most music educators graduate from performance-based degree programs with limited, if any, study of composition, they nonetheless assert the importance of creativity within the music education curriculum. In fact, they are at the heart of creative music-making ventures in schools, in that they provide the pedagogical models and sequences. Creative musical experiences abound: Young children in “rhythm bands” with sticks and drums, pint-sized players of Orff-styled wood xylophones in a Schulwerk exercise intended to draw out the soloistic expressions of individual students between “tutti” sections, middle schoolers at work in programs fashioned after professional digital audio workstations (DAW), secondary school jazzers with impressive performance chops to enable them to join in the process of taking solos and “trading fours”

Music educators value the compositional process as a means of engaging students in divergent ways of musical thinking as well as in understanding music through direct manipulation and exploration of its elements. Through their efforts, students deepen their knowledge of melody and rhythm, phrasing and form, and texture through carefully constructed curricular opportunities to explore new musical designs.

Yet efforts in the pedagogy of composition in American music education have all too seldom given attention to culture, whether to offer global examples of compositional efforts, or experiences in compositional processes from diverse cultures, or opportunities to develop musical works that emanate from students’ own families, local communities, or mediated musical forms. Instead, composition in music education has tilted toward the ideals of Western-oriented Euro-American (or European) musical expressions, upholding standards of Western-styled art, folk, and popular music as models to emulate in both content and process. Conceptualizations of composition pedagogy are frequently associated with white culture, given that the preponderance of music educators are white, their conservatory trainings are rooted in Western-oriented white art music, and the music education curricular standards continue to perpetuate the music, pedagogies, and ideals of Western-white culture.

Little attention has been given to the impact of culture on composition, nor has there been a thorough-going effort to reach to the values of black, brown, and indigenous students, their cultural communities, and their musical identities. Whose music should stand as models of composition? Which teachinglearning approaches could be put into play to allow students’ own musical voices and values to be expressed? How can students of marginalized communities be brought headlong into compositional experiences? Moreover, can creativity and culture converge in school music classrooms, so that all learners can be enticed and encouraged to express themselves in ways that are at the core of who they are ?

Asset Pedagogies as a Post-Colonial Framework for the Compositional Process

It is widely maintained that the American educational system has functioned to preserve white cultural hegemony (Alim & Paris, 2017; Darder, 2012; Banks, 2004). A hegemonic system has long been evident in the development of curriculum, pedagogies, and policies whose purpose is to devalue the experiences, contributions, and epistemologies of marginalized groups while upholding those of dominant white culture. In response to the commonly held view that Black, Brown, and Indigenous students maintain a deficit of skills and knowledge to successfully navigate educational spaces, educationists such as James Banks, Gloria Ladson Billings, Geneva Gay, and Django Paris have developed theories to challenge this harmful thinking. Rather than viewing the cultural backgrounds of marginalized students as an impediment to educational achievement, scholars draw on this knowledge as an asset and resource to increase student engagement.

These approaches are generally referred to as asset pedagogies, which serve to reposition “the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices of working-class communities, specifically poor communities of color, as resources and assets to honor, extend, and explore in accessing white middle-class dominant cultural norms of acting and being that are demanded in schools” (Alim & Paris, 2017, p. 4). Asset pedagogies emerged in the 1990s as a result of decades of research that began in the late 1970s when student responses were studied as to their assimilative influences in their learning environments. Noteworthy, too, were deficit pedagogies that sought to denigrate students’ cultural backgrounds so that they could be shed and supplanted with values that were congruent with Whitestream learning spaces and institutions (Urrieta, 2010). Descriptions follow of three notable asset pedagogies—culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, and funds of knowledge, each of which have been recognized as relevant to music education practices.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. The concept of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) was first introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings in her pioneering article, “Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy” (1995). In this grounded theory study, she examined classrooms where African American students were experiencing success to document how pedagogical practices that provided encouragement and guidance to these students related to the central elements of CRP including student achievement, cultural competence, and cultural critique. Ladson-Billings was able to deduce three overlapping characteristics of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy that teachers demonstrate: (1) the conceptions of self and others held by culturally relevant teachers, (2) the manner in which social relations are structured by culturally relevant teachers, and (3) the conceptions of knowledge held by culturally relevant teachers (p. 478). In essence, CRP challenges notions of assimilation, and asserts that pedagogical practices “must provide a way for students to maintain their cultural integrity while succeeding academically” (p. 476).

Successful teachers whose pedagogy was grounded in the tenets of CRP demonstrated their belief-i n-action, that all students are capable of success in academic pursuits (Ladson-Billings, 2009). As well, successful teachers viewed themselves as part of the community and, thus are invested in the success of students to “give back” and improve their community. This perception of oneself as a contributing member of the community is then passed on to their students through activities that help “students make connections between their community, national, and global identities” (Ladson- Billings, 2009, p. 38).

Being attendant to CRP requires that teachers focus much of their efforts in the classroom on demonstrating authentic caring (Valenzuela, 1999). This concept defines the ways that teachers seek to develop relationships that are grounded in equity and reciprocity as a means for creating an academic environment conducive to learning. CRP teachers encourage positive peer relationships as a means to develop as a community of learners where students are encouraged to “learn collaboratively and be responsible for another” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 480).

Teachers succeeding in the precepts of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy demonstrate a tendency to conceptualize knowledge in ways that allowed for all students to feel that their contributions to the learning community are valued and essential to the construction of shared knowledge within it. One way that this can be achieved is to develop students’ belief that they are independent learners and capable of viewing all knowledge critically. In essence, this decenters the teacher as the sole producer of knowledge and situates them as another member of the learning community (albeit, a facilitator) that is invested in the success of the group. An additional characteristic of efficacy in this domain is that CRP teachers view assessments not as a measure of dichotomized demonstrations of right or wrong but, rather, as a means to allow students to demonstrate multiple forms of excellence that are congruent with their valued modes of learning.