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When Invisible Means Inaudible: Asian Diasporas/Americans in Music Education

Sat, April 26, 1:30 to 3:00pm MDT (1:30 to 3:00pm MDT), The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 107

Abstract

In music education at all levels, the White racial frame (Feagin, 2020) of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment constitutes a serious barrier to the participation and success of Asian diaspora/ American musicians. The barriers include performance standards and repertoire that perpetuate the sound of Whiteness (Koza, 2009), a curriculum rooted in eugenics (Koza, 2021), epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016), and a signature pedagogy (Shulman, 2005) that all too often devolves into an ongoing series of know-your-place aggressions (Mitchell, 2019). When positioning Asian Diasporas/Americans as eternal foreigners and Model Minorities, and dismissing their capabilities outside of STEM and business, the lived experiences of Asian Diaspora/American musicians become invisible in the classrooms. Further their music becomes silenced in the repertoire. Theoretically drawing upon Critical Race Theory, especially AsianCrit (Chang, 1993; Han, 2014; Iftikar & Museus, 2019), we examine music education as a complex racialized institution (Ray, 2019) that operates through a master narrative of White supremacy. This institution treats the lives and music of Asian Diaspora/American musicians as a deficit to be repaired through practices of anti-Asian curriculum violence (Kim, 2024, p. 35) such as assimilation into Whiteness through pedagogy and repertoire (Ewell, 2020, 2023), or as resource to be colonized for White success (Hess, 2015). We do this through analysis of the narrativity of music as text, performance, and social act of Asian Diaspora/American musicking (Small, 1998) in K-12 and higher education, using a combination of interviews and documentary sources (standards, curricular documents, textbooks, and the like).

Having established the White racial frame of music curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, we then consider the power of critical counter-narrative as a liberatory praxis (Liu, et al., 2023; Miller, et al., 2020) to reframe music education in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. We conceive of critical counter-narrative as a transformative methodology uniting Critical Race Theory and a praxis grounded in the hermeneutic cycle of critical reflection (Liu, 2015) and generative change (Ball, 2009) in pursuit of educational equity (Miller et al., 2020, p. 292). Employing critical counter-narrative as a methodology in this case involves returning to the curriculum violence established in the first part of the paper, using those findings as the basis to rewrite the dominant narratives of music education, making Asian Diaspora/American musicians visible and audible by remixing (Pritchard et al., 2021) the data in new and critical ways. We conclude by providing a set of strategies grounded in AsianCrit for developing critical narratives that counter the invisibility and inaudibility of Asian Diasporas/Americans in music education at all levels.

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