My thinking about how to bring social justice through music education
In general, towards helping students recognize the barriers between ethnic groups, the mode of the project borrows some ideas of El Sistema, which provides a teaching method different from the Chinese unifies curriculum. This project offers students a progressive learning method that they can choose music they like, such as Uighur folk music. Money should be raised from donation and be overt to the society according to related Chinese laws. Recruiting volunteers is difficult, because those students who have music skills tend to work for music training schools with salary. But we can recruit volunteers from students’ families, who are not working full-time can donate their spare time organizing and cooking. The heart of this project is having dialogues with teachers and students. First, the teachers must avoid indoctrination which is the teaching method of almost all the schools in China. Indoctrination is utilized because of exam-oriented education. The assessment of my project is through concerts and festivals. So, teachers should realize that this project is to decrease students’ pressure and get rid of the inertia of indoctrination from the education that they have received. Second, teachers should respect students’ opinion whilst keep sticking to the schedules. In this project, before students choose ethnic folk music, teachers should give information about the context of those music and encourage them to listen to them. Finally, I will keep looking for some articles related to participatory music that they cannot search for in China, to facilitating teachers reflecting themselves through various teaching experience. Before having dialogues with students, teachers should research and analyze students’ music level. Similar with El Sistema, this project divide students into two groups based on their musical level in ensemble practices; the two groups are combined in choir practices. The goal is to guarantee no one left. In this case, teachers have dialogues with the students in choir practices about ethnic minorities’ music and their cultures. If those students hold discrimination to ethnic minorities, teachers should talk the students through the importance of respect and the negative of discrimination. Some discrimination are subconscious, so that teachers should observe students’ behavior in learning ethnic minorities’ music classes. This project is based on creating a collaborative environment for students, with addressing subconscious discrimination as an important function of it. Since there is no El Sistema or similar musical organization in China, this could be a pilot project. To my mind, teachers’ role should be similar with a coordinator, which means they should control only the time and encourage students to talk. To initiate this project, I will have dialogues with teachers in the very beginning. If the teachers can not get rid of the indoctrination-style teaching method, the pressure from teachers will drive students away. If the teachers can not handle the relationships between students, barriers will occur in these classes.
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