Ruth Wright is a Senior Lecturer in the Cardiff School of Education at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK where she teaches on music education programmes and is Pathway Leader of the Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD).

Sounding Off:

"Teaching music for social justice"

In his book The Singing Neanderthals Stephen Mithen (2006) presented evidence suggesting that the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens has made music as a means of communication since its earliest days on this planet; that music is hard wired into our makeup.

Many of us argue that musicking (to use Christopher Small’s term) may be conceived of as a basic human need and that an education providing musical participation in a meaningful and satisfying way should be an entitlement of every young person in our education systems. In this blog, I want to look at the implications of this understanding for music teachers, the particular questions our subject raises concerning equality of opportunity and the potential it offers for working for social justice in music but also more broadly in education. I propose that informal learning as classroom music pedagogy may empower pupils and teachers to develop pre-existing capacities to act to these ends. Those of us working in music teacher education and continuing professional development could play important roles in what Schmidt (2005) calls the conscientization of the teaching profession, providing encouragement to consider not only keen awareness and detailed knowledge of social and political factors governing their daily practice but also exhorting teachers to exercise their power to challenge and unsettle dominant conceptions of music and musical learning and to advance emancipation and social mobility of all of their students.

Social justice, democracy and music education

My teaching career has had a thread running through that I see now when I look back on it of championing the ‘underdogs’ in terms of social or distributive justice concerning music in schools; before I start sounding too saintly I must emphasise that I made as many mistakes and mistaken assumptions about my pupils as probably the rest of the UK teaching profession put together and certainly didn’t always practice what I now preach, but unbeknownst to me and only realized in hindsight I seemed to have this inbuilt ‘it’s not fair’ bell that went off all the time. In schools it was about challenging heads of department and then headteachers about who should and could do music at KS4 and beyond, about the content and learning styles of the music curriculum and the reflection of that curriculum in concerts and productions; in the university and with mentors in teacher education it’s been about who should be accepted onto teacher training courses, how people from non traditional musical backgrounds might work effectively in schools with children and young people, what, how and why they teach and the questioning of whether being able to teach Bach chorale and read an orchestral score are really the most important elements of the knowledge base for music teachers in the 21st century. My embryonic research work had a go at thrashing out some of these issues but never really managed to get out of a repetitive curriculum, pedagogy, ability loop until I began my PhD and had the epiphany of working with a sociologist of education Professor Brian Davies at Cardiff University who gave me a new pair of goggles through which to examine my research issues. Suddenly everything began to make a lot more sense when I slotted music education into the much bigger frame of education and its social and political context. Brian was an ex student and colleague of the British sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein and introduced me to his work. Things started making sense in my mind when I read Bernstein (2000, xx) stating that:

‘(E)ducation is central to the knowledge base of society, groups and individuals. Yet education also, like health, is a public institution, central to the production and reproduction of distributive injustices.’ (Bernstein, 2000: xix)

I began to see how class, background, power, ethnicity and gender acted in schools to reproduce certain injustices in society in terms of who can best make use of education. I also realized how exaggerated these factors became in their effects on pupil access to music in education. Bernstein looked to democracy to address issues of distributive injustice in schools by suggesting that truly democratic schools would allow pupils equal access to three fundamental and interrelated rights:

• enhancement the right to critically understand the present and believe that the future holds possibilities for change,
• inclusion: the right to be included socially, intellectually, culturally
• participation: the right to have a voice in situations where order is formed and changed.

He suggested that there is a direct relationship between social group and acquisition of knowledge in that unequal distribution of images, knowledges, possibilities and resources affects rights of participation, inclusion and individual enhancement. Furthermore, pupils who do not receive these rights in school, he suggested, are likely to come from social groups who do not receive these rights in society. Changes in pedagogies may however offer us new opportunities to work alongside our students in ways that may raise consciousness of these distributive injustices and empower teachers and pupils to begin to address them.

Informal learning in music education

Lucy Green suggests that there is a strong correlation between the pedagogy experienced in music education and student success and or persistence in studying music. She suggests that the introduction of informal music learning approaches into the classroom may raise levels of enthusiasm and commitment to music, elevate motivation and provide a range of musical skills hitherto omitted from the school music curriculum. Green also asserted that such an approach could address issues of inclusion particularly for those pupils unable to realise their musicality through traditional music learning models and lead students to a wide appreciation of a variety of styles and genres of music as her research with popular musicians suggested. This approach offers great potential for music education to address Bernstein’s rights of inclusion, enhancement and participation. It offers the chance to reflect new images as of value in the school mirror and to extend knowledges and possibilities offered to more of our young people. It also offers the potential for education to become a ‘leading out’ of students’ existing capacities and potentials in musical and social areas.

I believe that any education system that does not explicitly take account of issues of oppression such as distributive injustice supports by default the status quo. As such it is incapable of bringing about change in social consciousness and liberation through societal change. The writings of authors as disparate as Froebel, Dewey, and Lindeman all contain messages however of education as a means of achieving freedom from domination of one social group by another. I would argue that informal learning in music education has the capacity to work to great effect in this context developing awareness and pre-existing capacities in students to act for social justice. It is here that the work of Paolo Freire may be useful to consider in looking at the potential for informal learning as liberatory eduction.

Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), proposed a view of the relationship between education and emancipation, focusing upon the concept of power sharing within learning. Education is exhorted to move away from a ‘banking’ model in which ‘deposits’ are made by the teacher in the mind of the learner. Instead all aspects of learning processes are negotiated between learners and teachers, students being empowered with control over their own learning. A collegial atmosphere is advocated, featuring mutually respectful dialogue between teachers and learners. An important facet of Freire’s model is that the teacher begins from the learner’s everyday, lived experience. Such an approach creates spaces in which students can practice empowerment by directing their own learning while, at the same time, acquiring and developing knowledge and skills necessary to exercising empowerment for social change beyond the classroom. Crucial to this process is what Freire labelled liberatory praxis; committed action informed by underlying beliefs and theories, in education, the teaching action itself necessarily becoming part of a liberatory praxis, always seeking to transform the social order. A distinguishing element in Freire’s liberatory, educational model is the development in the oppressed of ‘critical consciousness’. Education must not only provide the poor and minorities with skills of literacy as both basic societal need and prerequisite to achievement of social mobility, it also has a duty to promote critical reflection upon the circumstances in which they live and a critique of the ‘givens’ in their world. By promoting critical reflection of distributive and social injustice people become empowered to imagine and, thus, work for something better. Historical reflection upon the circumstances in which the poor and minorities find themselves, allows them to see their lives in a sequential fashion, as having a past, present and a, potentially different, future. I would suggest that many of our young people in schools, the poor and minorities, are not so far removed from the third world conditions of oppression of which Freire wrote as many of us would like to think. I would further argue that current work on informal learning as classroom music pedagogy has many connections to liberatory praxis and could provide a valuable means for extending the liberatory power of music in education and making concrete its potential. The results could be a challenging of the social and cultural status quo and empowerment of teachers and students to effect social change.

Those of us working in music teacher education and continuing professional development could play important roles in what Schmidt (2005) calls the conscientization of the teaching profession, providing encouragement to consider not only keen awareness and detailed knowledge of social and political factors governing their daily practice but also exhorting teachers to exercise their power to challenge and unsettle dominant conceptions of music and musical learning and to advance emancipation and social mobility of all of their students. What do you and your student teachers think? I’d be interested to know.

Bernstein, B. (2000), Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory, research, critique (revised edition) Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed New York: Continuum

Green, L. (2001) How Popular Musicians Learn London: Ashgate

Mithen, S. (2005) The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005.

Schmidt, P. (2005) Music Education as Transformative Practice: Creating New Frameworks for Learning Music through a Freirian Perspective. Visions of Research in Music Education Special Edition, January 2005 http://www.rider.edu/~vrme

Ruth Wright is an active researcher, presenting at international conferences and publishing in peer reviewed journals. She is a member of the editorial boards of the British Journal of Music Education and Visions of Research in Music Education, the journal of the New Jersey Music Educators Associate, New York, USA. She is currently lead author and editor of a book for Ashgate Press entitled Sociology and Music Education.

Ruth Wright is a TTRB (Teacher Training Resource Bank) reviewer. Read her TTRB reviews.