Redemption Songs: Creating and Sustaining Legacies of Freedom Through Pedagogies of Music

• In Event: 60.075 - The Determination to Succeed

Abstract

This presentation blurs the socially constructed lines between Black culture and the culture of the academy using four propositions: 1) African/African American ways of knowing using music are underutilized in teacher education and P-12 classrooms. 2) Music has provided an important backdrop for historical and contemporary struggles for freedom and can be used mobilize people to act. 3) In our daily lives, music often plays an important spiritual role, but has been relegated to the periphery in the academy. 4) When Black scholars continue to relegate our cultural ways of being to the periphery of our academic lives, we limit the transformative possibilities and power that these epistemologies hold and contribute to narrow definitions of what is considered “appropriate.”

Authors

• Gloria S. Boutte, University of South Carolina

• George Lee Johnson, South Carolina State University

• Anthony Broughton, University of South Carolina - Columbia