The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education

Description

Music education has historically had a tense relationship with social justice. One the one hand, educators concerned with music practices have long preoccupied themselves with ideas of open participation and the potentially transformative capacity that musical interaction fosters. On the other hand, they have often done so while promoting and privileging a particular set of musical practices, traditions, and forms of musical knowledge, which has in turn alienated and even excluded many children from music education opportunities. Teaching multicultural practices, for example, has historically provided potentially useful pathways for music practices that are widely thought to be socially just. However, curricula often map alien musical values onto other musics and in so doing negate the social value of these practices, grounding them in a politics of difference wherein "recognition of our difference" limits the push that might take students from tolerance to respect and to renewed understanding and interaction.