Using Music for Deconstructing Immigrant Discourses: A Critical Analytic Approach

• In Event: DREAMers, Immigrant Rights Advocates, and Allies: Strategic Engagements to Expand PK–16+ Public Education

Abstract

It is a truism that constructivist instruction needs to build on learners’ previous knowledge to be effective. However, teachers are facing challenges to educate learners at a time when anti-immigrant trends, as represented by State Bill 1070, enacted in Arizona and other states, continue to restrict immigrants’ entry and access to public services. What does it mean to educate immigrant children when access to using knowledge from their background may raise fear or suspicions about their legal status? How can teachers become strong allies to prepare these learners to not only be successful with academic gatekeeping but also successful sociopolitically in challenging injustices that threaten their family life and community? We present in this session, a proposal for working with this complexity.

Our presentation answers the question, “How can teachers draw productively on immigrant students’ resources without embarrassing or marginalizing them from peers and, equally importantly, from the curriculum?” We share a promising critical instructional approach to integrate music and various content areas while developing academic language and literacy. We endorse and leverage the possibilities and promises of music to develop democratic engagement.

In the U.S. accountability in education has been narrowly focused on subjects monitored by local, state and national high-stakes testing. Consequently, many schools have relegated music to the list of “specials” or extracurricular subject areas while others have drastically reduced budgets which all together have eliminated music. We argue for the re-insertion of music into the curriculum for instrumental and integrative purposes. Notably, music has been recognized for its ability to help increase language learners’ linguistic abilities: prosody, pronunciation, syntax and lexical retrieval. However, we extend its possibilities by also advocating its use to increase learners’ analytic and creative potential, useful at all levels of schooling. In particular, we see that mainstream teachers who teach social studies, government, economics, geography, and sociology in history can avail themselves of music that raises themes of immigration to further student engagement in the curriculum (Cummins, 2011). Here we illustrate how teachers can raise critical consciousness about immigration through systematic analysis of music and lyrics (Fairclough,2012). We draw on Willis et al.’s (2008) notion of critical consciousness to show how scaffolding can accomplish a shift in perspectives. Willis et al. advocated “challenging the underlying assumptions that work in the internal and external worlds to privilege some while disprivileging others” (p.5). Consequently, the analysis and appreciation of music may offer a space to consider deterring the historical replication of harsher treatment towards newcomers by immigrants themselves and their peers who can become allies.

For the purposes of this presentation we provide one example of a supportive instructional practice to adequately scaffold trust building and learner empowerment through activities that build learners’ interpretative skills and creative use of tools in music. This constructive process enables learners to critically interpret and construct messages in their environment and to act on these as savvy consumers and producers of music, reading between the lines and writing beyond the lines with music.

Authors

• Theresa Y. Austin, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Gertrude M. Tinker Sachs, Georgia State University