Troubling Transcultural Collaboration in Music Education: Prioritizing Anti-Colonial Thinking

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Examinations of Music Education (Table 22)

Abstract

So-called transcultural pedagogy in North American classrooms often utilizes an extractive logic, serving to essentialize culture, invisibilize logics that are incongruent to Eurocentric and Americentric epistemologies, and uphold the goal of white assimilation under the guise of creolization. As former K-12 music educators, now in higher education, we observed how music teachers engage in “world music” in the classroom, often via a touristic model (Hess 2015). In this paper, we trouble transcultural practices in music education, drawing on anti-colonialism as a theoretical framework. We ultimately aim to construct an ethical approach to world music pedagogy through the use of narrative and counterfactual history.

Authors

• Lorenzo Sánchez-Gatt, Boston University

• Saleel Menon, Michigan State University

• Juliet Hess, Michigan State University