Performatively Voicing the Political Educational Economies: What Studying Sound Can Do for and to Educational Researchers

• In Event: Exploring the Sonic in Music Teaching & Learning

Abstract

In her now classic The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children, Lisa Delplit (1988) documents how ongoing silencing of educational possibilities for children of color is enacted by systemically entangled expressions of power and teaching that allow such silencing to perceived as matters of course. Such silencing can be understood as part of ongoing educational eugenics tendencies (e.g., Winfield, 2007; Love, 2023) and the use of standardization and scientific curriculum making (e.g., Au, 2008; Schubert, 1986; Taubman, 2009).

Educational literature is riddled with sonic understandings, from language about voice and listening to conceptualizations of argumentation and lesson planning. Yet it continues to be the case that educational scholarship tends to overlook longstanding histories of sound in education, forms of negation whether in discussions of teacher education or in presentations of sounds and the sonic in education as novel (e.g., Author C, 2020; 2022)—yet another silenced dialogue.

In similar fashion, music education has long held to its Western Art music roots that continues to unfold around questions of whiteness and music theory (Ewell, 2023) or the sonic colonialisms of hungry listening (Robinson, 2020), for example. As with education more generally, music education continues to privilege written, technical aspects of music as both the only and correct pathways for music education as well as to the exclusion and silencing of many if not most non-Western musical educational trajectories—a settler colonialist musical education (e.g., Hess, 2021).

This is the case even when non-Western musical educational forms are taught, a kind of music educational gerrymandering that at once fences those forms in their separate spaces while highlighting the possibilities in their differences (e.g., Hovde, 2021). That such sonic color lines (Stoever, 2016) have crossed over from culture to schooling is hardly surprising yet deeply troublesome nonetheless.

The existence of an educational sound studies and its expressions has been previously outlined (e.g., Author C, 2012, 2017) and a lack of awareness to those ends is an (un)intentional dampening of deep histories of attention to sound education, as music and voice in/as curriculum and pedagogy for example (e.g., Aoki, 1991; Erickson, 1982; Miller, 1982) and its more contemporary expressions (e.g., Author D, 2018, 2022; Emdin, 2010; Powell, 2008; Shannon, 2020).

Rather than rearticulate understandings of the presence of sonic studies in education, this proposed paper serves as a performative expression of what sounds do in educational ecologies, for the political economy for what sounds can do in education and educational research. Drawn from two sonic ethnographies, this paper documents the ways that sounds impact everyday schooling, how it can be utilized as modes for research, and how a combination sonic study and research impacts the sonic life of educational researchers. In so doing, this piece performatively reharmonizes our sonic educational imaginaries in ways that have implications for sonic studies in education and possibilities for sound in music education.

Authors

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University

• Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington