LEARNING TO LEARN
A culturally responsive music curriculum needs to include diversity across social and ethnic strata, too. Hein’ s polemic argues that‘ the Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value’. It is a point of contention whether the educator should decide what music is to be learnt and therefore valued, or whether one should respond to the lived experience of young people and the music they engage with on a day-to-day basis. It should not be a zero-sum game, and ultimately diversity and inclusion is the answer. Whilst being diverse, educators also need to be willing to decentre the styles of music they might have hitherto privileged. Hein’ s blog issues the directive that‘ music educators can support the growth of culturally flexible students who possess multiple cultural competencies and are able to relate to people different from themselves’.
Just another hashtag?
Is the current obsession with equality, diversity and inclusiveness just a fad? Far from it. The last five hundred years of history have witnessed a gradual progression towards greater liberty of the individual. Via watershed moments such as the Reformation, Enlightenment and French Revolution, the aspiration of equal rights for all is being gradually reified. Grayling( 2007, p. 3) lists the abolition of slavery, the rights of working people, and the enfranchisement of women as some of the fruits of the struggle for liberty. One of the frontiers now is the inclusion in society of transgender people and their experiences. Music, and by extension the expressive arts, as a site of social and political contestation can benefit from as well as contribute to the progress of individual liberty. As a medium that expresses both the communal and personal, it is ideally equipped, if we only allow it, to give voice to all our diversity and difference.
Clara Schumann
Fanny Mendelssohn
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