By Dr. Georgiary Bledsoe and Dr. Sonya White Hope

The current climate of racially-charged discord has jolted many music educators into the realization that they play a role in maintaining the status quo - or changing it. This realization is one of the drivers of culturally relevant pedagogy. There is increasing clarity that teachers who discard students’ cultural assets do so to the detriment of themselves, their students and society. “Engaging an Africentric Paradigm” introduces a mode of music education grounded in Black heritage and culture; presents it as indispensable to culturally relevant pedagogy; and explains how music educators can engage it.

We - Dr. Georgiary (GB), ethnomusicologist and piano teacher, and Dr. Sonya (SWH), middle school string teacher and music education scholar - team up here in an effort to name the problem and offer solutions. Our conversation seeks to interweave theory and practice. 

Let’s compare music education to a blanket in which different types of yarn add hue and heft, texture and richness. But notice that this blanket is rather thin, since it has only one kind of yarn. It has to be folded for warmth, limiting the number of students it can cover. Is it time to unfold this blanket and weave in some new strands? Can we also cover the students who are left out in the cold? We say yes. 

GB: King and Swartz , in their book on Afrocentric Pedagogy (2016), make a distinction between heritage knowledge and cultural knowledge. Heritage knowledge refers to a group repository of values, ideas, practices and ways of being that give you a sense of belonging to your people. All cultures have heritage knowledge. For instance, my heritage knowledge includes the way my piano teacher scatted while tapping the rhythms on my back. Tapping helped me embody the rhythms and scat made unique connections between music and language. In contrast to heritage knowledge, cultural knowledge is the knowledge you gain about the legacies and patterns of cultures other than your own. For example, in my first encounter with German, in sight-singing class at Stanford, I gave the words a French pronunciation. To sum up this point, heritage knowledge is insider knowledge you inherit from your own people, and cultural knowledge is outsider knowledge that you learn about other people’s heritage.

SWH: This difference between heritage knowledge and cultural knowledge is very real in the music classroom. A classic example is “Hot Cross Buns.” We use it often to introduce beginners to recorders and notation. It’s a British folk song that is very much grounded in real experience. You can actually go to a store and buy hot cross buns. But you aren’t likely to find any in our neighborhood. This is also the case with “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” There was a real Mary in Boston, who had a lamb that she brought to school. But she didn’t look like me or you. These songs represent heritage knowledge and we teach it as heritage knowledge. But in fact, they’re heritage knowledge for only a portion of the class. Our field started with the assumption that the heritage knowledge of white Westerners was superior to the heritage knowledge of all other people. Now, the music education practices we carry out today are the codification of those assumptions.

GB: Building on the way that heritage knowledge can be distinguished from cultural knowledge, let’s consider their ramifications in the educational setting. In classrooms where the teacher and student share a common heritage, insider knowledge and shared musical values inform the choices made - repertoire, pedagogy, performing style, assessment, etc. By contrast, in classrooms where the teacher and student do not share a common heritage, they both make choices that may not be understood by the other. Not only are 90% of music teachers white, but music education training programs are Eurocentric. Therefore, in large measure, white children have frequent experiences of their heritage in the music classroom and children of color do not. While white children benefit from a high level of cultural relevance, children of color have been left out in the cold.

SWH: Relationships are key to understanding how this plays out in the music classroom. The most important relationship is between the teacher and the student’s heritage. If they share a heritage, then the scope and sequence of learning will feel natural and make sense for both. If they do not share a heritage and the teacher is unable to provide meaningful access, the student is obliged to make her own connections to the material and/or be left out. Students experience the absence of their own heritage as an indicator that not only is their heritage lacking in value, but that they themselves are lacking in value. Teachers unwittingly and sometimes overtly label students’ heritage knowledge as aberrant or undesirable. This happens every single day. Students internalize these ideas and it can negatively impact their academic performance and engagement.

GB: The irony is that this bifurcated value structure, long established in music education, does not reflect the fluid nature of American culture and it certainly does not reflect the central role of our music. Music education in the U.S. provides a deep and thorough grounding in European thought, aesthetics and values. Black music traditions, modalities and values are equally important to American culture. The music education we currently offer is therefore woefully distorted. Our music is at the center of the birth and evolution of American music and a major cultural export. If we want to be truly culturally relevant to every student in this country and if we want to correct the distorted ways we teach music, then we need to bring African American music in from the margins. We need to counterweight white supremacy with a deep understanding of Africentric heritage and culture. The key to making this happen is teachers. Honesty about the meaning of cultural relevance in this country requires that we weave the rich strands of Africentric heritage knowledge into our music education blanket. In each of the next four articles, we illuminate ways that teachers can do just that and we engage Africentric dispositions, aims, methods and content.

We close this introductory piece with a few important observations. Mainstream American music education was born and nurtured in segregation. The repertoire, practices and concepts of the mainstream music classroom were established to expressly mirror the racial hierarchy of society and to reject the music culture of Black Americans and others at the margins. The edifice of music education was built on and still stands on that racialized foundation. Over time, through practice and tradition, the racial hierarchy was baked into instruction. We think we’re teaching “repertoire,” “performing skills,” “music history,” and so on. And we are - in a very narrow way. But more damning, we’re also teaching white supremacy. The way we teach music is a proxy for the people and ideas we deem worthy and valuable. Join us next time for a conversation about the first pillar in our Africentric framework - Dispositions.

Reference:
King, J. and Swartz, E., 2016. The Afrocentric Practice of Teaching for Freedom: Connecting Culture to Learning. New York: Routledge, p.4.

To cite this article: 
Bledsoe, G., & White Hope, S. (2021, March). Engaging an Africentric Paradigm. Retrieved [insert date] from Ithttps://www.sankofasongs.org/articles/africentricparadigm

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