ABSTRACT

Intercultural performances and musical experiences present themselves to music teachers as important and meaningful ways in which to express and embrace the cultural diversity they see inside and outside the classroom. Indeed, as arts educator and critical thinker Maxine Greene would suggest, those of us who are 'imaginative enough' to be present in such in-between places of difference and diversity are laying bare the possibility to 'open pathways to better ways of teaching and better ways of life'. Crucial to the centrality of relationship to intercultural music education is a mode of relating to 'self' and 'other' grounded in respect. In an intercultural classroom, recognition is acknowledgment that each culture enters into the teaching and learning space with a unique and distinct set of cultural ways of knowing, being and doing. Another valuable way of thinking about intercultural music education classrooms as contact zones is through the lens of the cultural interface.