Cultural Sensitivity in the Facilitation of Creative Composition

Students deserve opportunities in our music education programs to exercise their agency. If music is an expressive art form, then composition is a process into which they can be invited to express their values, influences, and experiences.

The coinciding of the issues of creativity and culture are natural and even expected phenomenon. Yet they are largely overlooked by music educators, even when the compositional process can quite credibly embrace the cultural identities of students, the culturally-honed musical models that offer students ideas for the content and processes of creative musical expression, and pedagogical techniques that acknowledge the complexities of young student composers who warrant the teacher as facilitator rather than top-down absolute autocrat.

Facilitation requires an off-the-podium guide-on-the-side approach, and a respect by music educators for students, particularly those in marginalized groups, whose experiences differ from teachers’ own experience and education. The creative musical expressions of students are traceable to their identities, which frequently include membership in global youth culture as well as the cultural heritage of the communities in which they live. For composition to be relevant and meaningful to students “across the board," music educators will need to embrace the concept of culture and an understanding of the potential for the creative process to validate and empower students to express themselves in ways that allow them to represent their culture histories and their emerging and intersectional identities.

That can happen through the reform of university teacher education programs and professional organizations that acknowledge and present pathways that move past colonial and white-dominated structures to an embrace of local and global perspectives of the composition process as manifestation of culture.

References: Alim, S. H. and Paris, A. (2017). What is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and why does it matter? In A. Paris & S. H. Alim (Eds.), Culturally sustaining pedagogies: teaching and learning for justice in a changing world (pp. 1-25). Teachers College Press.

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