Reduction, Diffraction, and Disruption: Racial Hegemony and Colorblindness in Music Education at Predominantly Latinx Schools

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 20. K-12 Interventions and Academic Achievement

Abstract

Brewer (2010) found that Latinx, White, and multiracial band students conceived of band as a “White” activity within a school that was predominantly Latinx and Spanish-speaking but with a band program that was predominantly White and English-speaking. Brewer’s study pointed to an under-researched area in sociological investigations of music education, that music education itself may be racialized among students. However, Brewer’s study pointed to a gap in the literature with regard to racialization in settings in which all music students are students of color. Additionally, the racialized experiences of Latinx students from a sociological perspective is under-researched in the context of music education.

This project is a qualitative collective case study of students and teachers in music classes at large, predominantly Latinx high schools, schools in which Latinx students make up over 95% of the student population. Data will be collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews on the topic of students’ and teachers’ experiences with race and music education. Data will be treated according to the post-qualitative orientation discussed by Jackson and Mazzei (2018). As such, data analysis will take the form of “thinking with theory” as I plug the interview data into sociological theory and vice-versa. The theoretical framework guiding the research process will be racial formation theory (RFT; Omi & Winant, 2015). While research questions will arise inductively, the analytical tools of RFT (e.g., racial projects, racialization, and racial hegemony) may be useful in answering questions such as “How is race created, lived out, or destroyed in the music classroom?” and “As a racial project, does music class reproduce, extend, subvert, or challenge the systems it finds itself within?”

References

Brewer, W. D. (2010). Inside/outside: School music on “the line.” In L. Thompson & M. Campbell (Eds.), Issues of identity in music education: Narratives and practices (pp. 37–64). Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Author

• Samuel Escalante