From Glockenspiel to Mbira: An Ethnography of Multicultural Practice in Music Education.

Abstract

Multiculturalism in education has been growing in importance for the past several decades. This is reflected in an increase in the multiethnic material content of textbooks and the amount of materials currently on the market from publishers such as World Music Press. Although most educators claim to have some content in their curriculum, they struggle with very basic issues, such as which musical cultures to represent in the classroom, and more complex issues, such as the problems posed by their lack of knowledge about the musical cultures they choose to teach. Despite such struggles, educators seem to each be teaching their own form of music. Over the years, educators and researchers such as Palmer (1975), Elliott (1989, 1990), Standifer (1979), and Anderson and Campbell (1989) have given us ideas for the utilization of materials in the curriculum, but not a picture of the resulting realities or dilemmas such auricular additions or revisions might pose for the teacher. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to examine the practical problems surrounding the application of what has become known as multicultural music to the elementary school curriculum. It is an ethnographic account of one teacher's attempt to enlarge the scope of her teaching to include the of Africa. The study took place at a field site that I shall call Viewcrest Elementary School in a Pacific Northwest suburban school district. The main informant, a teacher whom I shall call Angela, welcomed me into her classroom as a colleague with whom she could exchange ideas, share successes, and express frustrations. During a 10-week period, I observed Angela work with the fourththrough sixth-graders and prepare the entire fifth grade for an evening program that she called the Africa Experience. I interviewed Angela and the fifth-grade classroom teachers on numerous occasions, using both openand close-ended questioning techniques. I also spoke with other teachers in the district and examined the elementary scope and sequence and other district documents. Of special interest to me in preparation for the Africa Experience evening were the sources for the musical materials selected for the performance, instructional strategies, the use of instruments and the development of instrumental accompaniments, and the extent to which Angela

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.