From Gesture to Meaning: Cultivating Musicality Through Culturally Sustaining Erhu Pedagogy in Higher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Educating Futures: Culture, Code, and Creativity in Transformative Pedagogies

Abstract

Restoring marginalized non-Western musical traditions in higher education, this study responds to AERA 2026’s call to “Unforget Histories and Imagine Futures.” It investigates how one-to-one erhu instruction cultivates musicality and intercultural understanding in a Western university context. Guided by experiential learning, embodied cognition, and cultural mediation, it employs multimodal pedagogy, including gesture‑based demonstration, vocal modeling, metaphor, and contextual framing, to connect technical practice with expressive cultural logics. Data from five adult beginners, including lesson recordings, interviews, field notes, and reflective documentation, reveal a developmental pathway of embodied engagement, dialogic cultural framing, and interpretive autonomy. These stages constitute cultivated musicality, a teachable capacity for expressive, culturally informed performance. Findings offer a replicable framework for culturally sustaining music teacher education.

Author

• WEN LI, Newcastle University