Curriculum Policy at the Center and Periphery

Decentering our existing convenient knowledge requires more than establishing a managerial understanding of the status quo and taking advantage of it—what we call admin or managerial savvy. We want to make a distinction that while the latter is part of policy know-how, and policy implementation is particularly beholden to administrative savvy, policy practice, and know-how are, however, broader concepts, which involve strategic planning, framing capacity, communicative skills, collaborative partnering, stakeholder engagement, visioning, consensus building, and programmatic expertise, among others.

As we see it then, breaking with ensemble-based convenient knowledge will require more than representative diversity of practices—replacing one system or sets of music for another, as the field has done at times with informal practices and popular music (see Georgii-Hemming & Westvall, 2010). Partially divesting ourselves from historic efforts to bring particular musics from current curricular periphery to the curricular “center” or “core” is a major challenge; particularly as whiteness and privilege remain key factors in how musics are legitimized. We pinpoint and discuss two legitimizing constraints later in this chapter—notions of genius and limitations of notation—both of which are in effect elitist and exclusionary while often conceived as customary requisites for compositional engagement and evaluation.

We should also not forget that traditional arguments around “quality music repertoire” perfectly map onto educational policy that over-privileges standardization, accountability, and “objective” learning outcomes. Such discourses, however, continue to place music (i.e., concrete cultural-specific idealized product) at the center, often distracting from curricular policy and dialogue directed toward how musical learning and creating (i.e., musical engagement and exploration as a dynamic collaborative process) can become a strong contributing factor to the challenges faced by schooling in general and curricular relevance in particular.

Our point is that the rhetorical, advocacy-based efforts toward valuing music as a disciplinary practice that must be recognized on its own rights, have consumed significant professional oxygen. These have drained energy that could otherwise be directed toward exploring music curricular efforts prizing equity, openness and innovation, intersectionality, social relevance, and personal meaning.

Today, this may be driven by policy strategies aimed at elevating the role of the “peripheral.” Central here is the notion that the periphery can and often does function according to parameters that are different from the core. Periphery as a concept tends to be a) outward-looking, b) inviting of collaboration, c) expansionist to boundaries, more willing to take risks, d) pedagogically adaptive, and e) less concerned with legitimate knowledge and legitimized actors. We believe that composition writ large can and should be seen as a signifier for reclaiming the peripheral in music education.

This means that it can focus on creating, while making use of performing and reproducing. It can be slightly disruptive, while a well-integrated part of the field. Composition in these terms can amass one such “bridging” space, pushing the boundaries of curricular practice, and thus come to be understood as more than an activity, sub-practice, or tool, but as a compelling element in eliciting student voice and agency toward social change.

Composition and Policy Change. In policy terms, strategic action that would incentivize composition as a diverse pedagogical practice could place music education more visibly in the service of educative projects aiming to engage in cultural production (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2020). This could foster a commitment to connections between learning, schooling, and the world around us. In such an integrative view, what may also become more evident to music educators in schools is that “most individuals are not merely the subjects of power but play a part in its operations” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 53), working not just to assert one’s right of existence, and rather focusing on how their presence helps to guarantee diverse, multi-modal, creative, and relevant learning rights for students.

From this perspective, a commitment to composition embodies some key characteristics of what Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez (2020) calls cultural production and may in fact help “develop a pedagogy and a practice of creative symbolic work that more effectively encapsulates the complexities of lived experience in and through creative expression and symbolic work” (p. 7). We would like to argue that a commitment to composition then could be the pragmatic, tangible pathway toward a cultural production framing that could also further facilitate a view of music education as “community-oriented work,” placing music curricular efforts perhaps at the intersection of “geographic awareness, framing disposition, activism, and policy engagement” (Schmidt, 2018, p. 411).

Such a framing could become a “leading disposition toward more diverse models of interaction with music-learning, music-making, and music-practicing that [even when functioning within schools] are ‘out-in-the-world’ ” (Schmidt, 2018, p. 405). This could be strategically operationalized by a coalition dependent on stronger policy know-how fostered by so disposed music teacher education programs, and a professional commitment from leading music educators working in K-12 settings. It could become a powerful tool to decolonization and culturally relevant teaching and learning.