Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education

Diversity and Social Justice in the Classroom

Lisa C. DeLorenzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317534549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teoría y apreciación musicales

This book examines how music education presents opportunities to shape democratic awareness through political, pedagogical, and humanistic perspectives. Focusing on democracy as a vital dimension in teaching music, the essays in this volume have particular relevance to teaching music as democratic practice in both public schooling and in teacher education. Although music educators have much to learn from others in the educational field, the actual teaching of music involves social and political dimensions unique to the arts. In addition, teaching music as democratic practice demands a pedagogical foundation not often examined in the general teacher education community. Essays include the teaching of the arts as a critical response to democratic participation; exploring democracy in the music classroom with such issues as safe spaces, sexual orientation, music of the Holocaust, improvisation, race and technology; and music teaching/music teacher education as a form of social justice. Engaging with current scholarship, the book not only probes the philosophical nature of music and democracy, but also presents ways of democratizing music curriculum and human interactions within the classroom. This volume offers the collective wisdom of international scholars, teachers, and teacher educators and will be essential reading for those who teach music as a vital force for change and social justice in both local and global contexts.

Part I
Music Education in a Democracy

1 Artistic Citizenship, Personhood, and Music Education

David J. Elliott

What does it mean to be an artistic citizen? What relationships exist between artistic citizenship and personhood? What’s the connection between artistic citizenship and music education? To begin the process of explaining the meaning(s) and real life applications of artistic citizenship, consider three examples.

In 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. He spent over 27 years in prison. For 18 of those years he was held on Robben Island, off Cape Town, doing hard labor. Despite his imprisonment, a massive social movement, which emerged from his ideals and his personal suffering, overthrew Apartheid and ultimately fostered peace and reconciliation. Anti-Apartheid freedom songs played a huge role in this movement and its ultimate success. Singing and songs, and all forms of instrumental music, are a fundamental part of every society’s unity, identity, and strength. The emotions aroused and expressed in the music and words of singing unite people in troubling times. As such, “musicing” played an indispensable role in the struggle against Apartheid and in voicing the people’s pleas to free Mandela.

Before moving forward, and for purposes of clarity in the complex contexts of artistic citizenship, allow me to emphasize that I’ve always defined and explained that “musicing” (e.g., Elliott 1995, 39–45, 129; Elliott and Silverman 2015, 16) is a multidimensional term. I’ve always defined musicing as inclusive of performing, improvising, composing, leading, dancing, listening, and the social-cultural contexts in which all forms of musicing occur. Clearly, musicing does not simply mean performing, as several commentators have stated falsely (e.g., Reimer 1996, 2003, 2009; Allsup 2010, 2013).

Returning to the example of musicing in South Africa, in 1976, American musician Gil Scott-Heron released the song “Johannesburg” that raised worldwide awareness of Apartheid; in 1980, Peter Gabriel recorded the lament “Biko,” which was a protest song that paid homage to anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko; in 1985, 49 musicians from around the world (including Run DMC, The Fat Boys, Steven van Zandt, Ringo Starr, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Miles Davis, and Ron Carter) came together from various musical contexts (i.e., hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and rock) and recorded the protest song “Sun City.” Organized by Jerry Dammers (one of the founders of Artists against Apartheid) in London in 1986, the festival Freedom Beat was attended by 250,000 people. With its success, Dammers organized a concert to celebrate Mandela’s 70^th birthday that included artists such as Phil Collins, Jessye Norman, Tracy Chapman, the Eurythmics, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, Harry Belafonte, Miriam Makeba, and Huge Masekela. Approximately 72,000 people attended the concert at Wembley Stadium while more than 600 million people from 60 countries watched the broadcasted event on television. Musicians—professionals and amateurs—from around the world sang against Apartheid and for the release of Nelson Mandela. Some say that it was because of those freedom songs that the world listened and came together to end Apartheid.

Second, on August 15, 1998, a car bomb exploded in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Explained as an act of terrorism, the bomb killed 29 people (plus two unborn children) and injured 220 others. As a reaction to this atrocity, the Omagh Community Youth Choir was formed (“The Omagh Community Youth Choir: Love Rescue Me” 2011). Established as a choir aimed at peace and reconciliation, Daryl Simpson and other local musicians brought together children and young adults from different backgrounds, traditions, and cultures to unite through song, to raise awareness of the Omagh community working together through music, and to bring joy and hope to those suffering during such harsh times. Since then, the choir—I consider these young people and their teacher to be artistic citizens—has continued to do good work, which became so powerful and widely distributed in Ireland that they were able to make recordings and seed many similar programs.

Third, as I explain elsewhere (Elliott 2007), after graduating from the University of Toronto in the late 1990s, Mary Piercey chose to become a music teacher and community musician in Arviat, which is a small Inuit community on the western coastline of Hudson Bay, in the Region of Canada called Nunavut. When Piercey arrived in Arviat, it was an impoverished, hopeless, drug-infested wasteland (Population: approximately 2000 people).

“Arviat” comes from the Inuktitut word arviq (“Bowhead Whale“). It is a traditional Inuit community in which hunting and fishing are the primary sources of sustenance. Today, Arviat is also well known in northern Canada and abroad for the work of Inuit artists, including musicians and visual artists who produce soapstone carvings and sculptures, shaman dolls, paintings, wall hangings, beadwork, and weaving. There is far more “behind” Inuit life in Arviat and Piercey’s work in this community than I can document here. Piercey (2012) explains that “Inuit Elders have a major voice in decision making for the [Arviat] community; the Inuit Community Justice Committee makes legal decisions; and Arviat Pilirgatigit designs programs that teach traditional cultural knowledge to youth” (85). The Arviat District Education Authority works through local elected committees. On the educational front, Inuit elders, parents, students, and teachers work together to develop and distribute the social goods of culture-based curricula, which operate alongside traditional Canadian curricula. Among its other responsibilities, the Arviat Authority hires elders to take senior students “on the land” to experience traditional ways of living, including learning how to survive by navigating the wilderness, reading the landscape, and hunting and preparing caribou meat.

Piercey was hired by the Authority to create a music program in the Qitiqliq High School that would provide her students and the community with indigenous and traditional music programs. Piercey’s assignment was to implement Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in the music program (Piercey 2012). This meant bringing traditional Inuit music into the classroom and reviving it among the youth of the community. Piercey explains that “the term Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit encompasses all aspects of traditional Inuit Culture including values, world-view, language, social organization, knowledge, life skills, perceptions, and expectations. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is as much a way of life as it is sets of information” (78). Over several years, and with the involvement of community music elders, Piercey learned and incorporated Inuit singing, drumming, and dancing in her program and linked these activities to community music and social life.

Piercey (2012) emphasizes that the elders’ aim for Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit was not to force a return to the past but to illuminate the strengths of Inuit so children could successfully negotiate their worlds (79). Piercey believes that through the combined efforts of the Educational Authority and the community’s elders, parents, and students her program of traditional Inuit music created stronger community connections in Arviat among elders, youth, and Inuit history toward community identity, cohesion, and development (85). From my perspective Piercey, and the multidimensional community of music makers and music making she helped create, is a community of artistic-musical citizens.

I have used these examples to introduce and make concrete the meaning(s) of artistic citizenship and to illustrate real life applications of the concept. Please notice that in these examples the term “artistic” is not at all restricted to elite, professional musicians. I use “artistic” in the broadest possible sense. In the context of artistic citizenship, the “artistic” refers to music makers of all ages and abilities who put their music making to work to facilitate and create positive social and cultural transformations—including, of course, advances in democracy and social justice—in their communities, whether these communities be local, national, or international.

If readers see value in these kinds of efforts, I suggest music education and music teacher education will be more effective in fulfilling their potential in the 21^st century if and only if we make sincere efforts to re-vision the traditional means-and-ends of music education and community music toward more democratic, socially just, ethical, and transformative concepts of and approaches to music education.

In other words, I’m less concerned right now with what-and-how to teach music in traditional and new ways—through school choruses, iPad orchestras, jazz choirs, drum circles, wind ensembles, song writing, etc.—and much more concerned with revisiting why most school music teachers and community musicians are doing any of these things. Are we just tweaking our traditional “means and methods,” or do we also have new opportunities and obligations to make a “democratic and transformative turn”?Let me try to build a case for music education as/for artistic-musical citizenship.

In ancient Greece, paedeia included an emphasis on the fullest development of students’ holistic-human personhood, including their abilities and dispositions to act ethically as ideal citizens of the polis. Notice two key words: human and citizens. What do I mean by personhood, and how should we characterize its “fullest development”? In Music Matters (Elliott and Silverman 2015), my co-author and I answer in detail, but briefly now, Aristotle encapsulated his answers in his concept of eudaimonia, which he defined as human flourishing through the lifelong pursuit of what is good, true, ethical, and virtuous. What do I mean by “citizen,” and how can citizenship be developed? As the eminent educational scholars Diane Ravitch (2013), Nel Noddings (2012), and David Kirp (2013) emphasize, American education has lost sight of these basic values and aims. Instead, American politicians and policymakers deliberately or unconsciously accept the values of “marketplace education” (Elliott 2009). These values, driven by the ideology of neoliberalism, duplicate the aims and “standards” of corporate capitalism at the expense of eudaimonia and key dimensions of our students’ personhood. In the US, education has become “big business.” US investors have come to realize that unless their portfolios include assets in the educational sector they are not well balanced. As my co-author and I explain (Elliott and Silverman 2015), more and more US schools are being directed and organized not by “educationally and ethically principled” principals, but by “managers” who work in relation to contemporary Wall Street strategies.

Personhood

What is personhood? Let me answer by combining several themes from current philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific research. As I do so, please think of the students you’ve taught in the past and/or are teaching now and recall how other teachers have conceived of, interacted with, and taught their students.

From one philosophical perspective (Chappell 2011; Elliott and Silverman 2015) called Criterialism, a living being is a person if and only if he or she possesses and/or can exhibit a limited set of features: rationality, sentience, emotionality, the capacity to communicate, self-awareness, and moral agency. As philosopher Timothy Chappell (2011) explains, as clear-cut as this concept of personhood may seem at first, it’s absurd—not to mention heartless—because it stipulates a very limited set of factors and would cause us to deny personhood to many individuals. For example, if complete self-awareness is a necessary condition of personhood, we’d be forced to accept the immoral conclusion that some mentally challenged people are not persons; if the capacity to communicate is a necessary condition for personhood, we’d be compelled to accept the equally immoral conclusion that a stroke victim fails to count as a person (Chappell 2011). In short, says Chappell, the Criterialist premise that human beings use a checklist process to determine whether another living being counts as a “person” is morally repugnant.

Contrary to Criterialism, our daily experiences demonstrate that, summarizing Chappell’s enlightened logic, partly because we’re socialized from birth as human beings, we recognize another person in advance of displays of his or her rationality, emotionality, self-awareness, and so forth. In other words, we assume, grant, and/or acknowledge that another human being possesses personhood and its many capacities before we “assess” the strengths of these capacities. For example, caring parents accept and understand automatically that their infants and young children are persons. Paraphrasing Chappell’s humanistic concept of personhood, parents do not begin treating their children as non-persons (e.g., as dolls, machines, or mice) and then make future decisions about their children’s qualifications for admission to the “club of personhood” depending on whether their children begin and/or mature in their rationality, communication skills, emotionality, and so forth (Chappell 2011, 6–7). Instead, parents treat their infants in relation to an “ideal of personhood,” and “this ethical idealization of the child is an ideal shared by most if not all other human beings” (8).

The process of idealization applies to all human beings before and during all human interactions. That is, moral, ethical, and empathic human beings (not psychopathic and sadistic terrorists) immediately and automatically take an “intentional stance” toward other humans as persons. If this is correct so far, it means there’s another exceedingly important motivation or “force” at work in our intuitive understandings of other people and personhood. Philosopher Donald Davidson (1980) calls this force the “principle of charity” (178). Davidson argues that this is an intuitive empathy that operates unnoticed in our mutual relationships: by charitably interpreting the other as a person, says Davidson, we bestow personhood on him or her—we constitute him or her as a person.

In the contexts of parenting and teaching, this means that even though it’s unrealistic to expect a young child to possess fully developed self-awareness, rationality, emotionality and so on, caring parents and teachers do so anyway. Why? Because as part of the charitable and empathetic human disposition, or developed “habit,” of idealization, teachers assume, or should assume, that “a child’s aspirations [or our aspirations for a child] are achievable simply because the child is a person (Chappell 2011, 10). Indeed, as teachers we are professionally and ethically bound to empower children to achieve their aspirations and the innate potentials of personhood.

The obvious follow-up to the idea that humans learn to “construct” each other with a “principle of charity” is the realization that every person deserves open access to free speech, health care, education, music education, and all other human rights of life, including—fundamentally—liberty, happiness, and eudaimonia. It follows that school music educators and community music facilitators must work in relation to an implicit and explicit principle of mutual charity for purposes of guiding the educational and musical actions of their students and community music participants.

Let’s go a little deeper and explain more fully the many integrated “systems” that ground and support the existence of human personhood and its many attributes.

Foundations and Processes of Personhood

Drawing support from non-dualist philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, Silverman and I (2015) propose that personhood seems to depend on the integration of many continuous and constantly changing systems and processes. The term “systems and processes” doesn’t mean brain systems and processes alone; it includes: (a) the combined body-brain-mind-conscious-and-unconscious systems and processes that contribute to the whole self and (b) the fluid systems and processes of our physical-social-gendered-cultural-historical contexts with which we interact constantly and that shape and reshape all processes of personhood. In other words, without all these systems and processes working together harmoniously, in the context of our shared human environments, there is no personal sense of you as your-self.

Implicit in this holistic sense of personhood is a strong resistance to today’s popular assumption that a person is essentially her brain, that everything that’s most important about you is inside your brain alone. This widespread, commonsense notion (fueled by robust brain research) sums to this: the brain’s neural processes are the key to everything human—perceptions...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Music Education in a Democracy
• Part II Building a Culture of Democracy in the Music Classroom
• Part III Music Education and Social Justice
• Part IV Preparing Music Educators for a Democratic and Social Justice Agenda
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index