Free Jazz in the Classroom: An Ecological Approach to Music Education

Abstract

A pronounced shift is occurring in fields concerned with contemporary education, psychology, and cognition, such that learning cannot simply be conceived of as transmitting and receiving factual information. When viewed from an ecological perspective, all knowledge is “co‐instituted” in which the learner is participating: it is embodied, situated, and distributed. Yet conventional jazz pedagogy frequently treats musical “knowledge” as individual, abstract, relatively fixed, and unaffected by the activity through which it is acquired and used to the detriment of more experiential, exploratory, and collective approaches to improvisation. Drawing on interviews with celebrated improvisers and pedagogues, this article confronts the conventional wisdom of jazz pedagogy and argues for more responsible and responsive educational practices.

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