Emerging Asset Pedagogies in Music Education

The previous section presented notable asset pedagogies that first emerged in the field of education and were then utilized by music educators seeking to situate their teaching within the principles of these asset-based pedagogies. Music-specific asset pedagogies have also been developed and used in various education settings, for learners of various ages and experiences. These approaches embrace the virtues of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Funds of Knowledge, but are shaped as well by the particularities of selected musical practices, the artist-musicians, and the communities to which they belong. Two approaches that focus on using aspects of various musical cultures as foundational to the instructional practice are Hip-Hop Pedagogy and World Music Pedagogy.

Hip-Hop Pedagogy for Developing Social Consciousness. Although Hip-Hop Pedagogy is a relatively recent framework that has been implemented in music education, the emphasis of drawing on the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) of students in urban settings provides great potential for “creating engaging and inclusive classrooms, increasing cultural relevance, and developing students’ critical social consciousness” in music education spaces (Kruse, 2014).

The term Hip-Hop Pedagogy is widely believed to have been coined by rhetoric scholar Jeff Rice (2003). However, this first iteration focused more on using hip-hop techniques such as sampling to develop alternative modes of composition (i.e., written essays) for college students and less on engaging minoritized students in urban schools. The practice of using Hip-Hop Pedagogy as a tool to engage minoritized students specifically was developed by Marc Lamont Hill (2009) as a means to introduce a “more expansive vision of pedagogy that reconsiders the relationships among students, teachers, texts, schools, and the broader social world” (p. 120).

Through examination of the urban youth context from which hip-hop emerged, Hill situates hip-hop as a “rich site for complex forms of identity work” (p. 1) that maintains profound possibilities for engaging marginalized (particularly Black and Brown) student populations. This occurs through the creation of culturally congruent learning spaces, providing opportunities to engage in alternative modes of academic discourse, and expanding the criteria for what is considered valid knowledge and cultural production. In his conceptualization of Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Hill (2009) presents three main classification for educators to consider when implementing this framework into their classrooms: pedagogies of hip-hop (i.e., understanding how knowledge is validated in hip-hop), pedagogies about hip-hop (i.e., analyzing, critiquing, and reproducing hip- hop), and pedagogies with hip-hop (i.e., using hip-hop to navigate traditional subject matter).

World Music Pedagogy as Pathway to a Broader Sonic Pallette. The academic recognition of music as a world phenomenon arose in the second half of the 19^th century when musicologists began to stretch their ears to music beyond the Western world and began to recognize the different but equally logical expressions that emanate from villages across the African continent and out of the royal courts of Asian kingdoms. They were “comparative musicologists,” paving the way for ethnomusicology to develop as a field in study of music as cultural behavior (Nettl, 2015). A century later, music educators saw that the study of world music cultures could serve as a pathway to intercultural understanding and global competence. It became clear that a pedagogical approach would need to be developed that would honor the logic and beauty of music from beyond the West, and that could develop a respect for people through the music that they make. In fact, it also seemed that the study of some previously neglected expressive forms might provide opportunities for marginalized students to find themselves in the music of cultures that had been dismissed at some earlier time as “unfit” for school curricular studies.

In her development of World Music Pedagogy, Patricia Shehan Campbell positioned it to recognize the value of music in every community and culture (Campbell 2004; 2018). It recognizes music as a badge of cultural identity and a means of bonding people together through experiences in listening, singing, and playing the music, dancing to the music, creating in the style of the music, and understanding the cultural meaning of music in its place of origin. Situated midway between the fields of ethnomusicology and music education, World Music Pedagogy embraces art, folk, and popular music practices of diverse cultural communities, both local and global, that are distinguished by such facets of identity as color, creed, socioeconomic status, gender-sexuality, lifestyle, and geographic region. It is a method that embraces both music and culture, and is intent on moving learners beyond the exclusive study of Western European Art Music (WEAM), and music that is historically of the white middle-class dominant culture that is the standard practice historically in school music programs.

World Music Pedagogy takes into account the widespread process of orality-aurality, of learning music by ear rather than via notation, and of learning music through multiple lenses, and of knowing music through an interdisciplinary experience that combines insights to music and culture through language, politics, history, geography, and the related arts. It asserts the importance of invention by students of new music in the style of a musical model through composition, thus “enhancing the skills and understanding of a strong musicianship” (Campbell & Lum, 2019, p. 106). Critical to World Music Pedagogy is the attention to music as cultural expression, and the potential students have of tapping into music that is close and far from them for the ways that it can help to shape identity as well as make people-to-people connections.