ABSTRACT
The overarching theme of this study is how the music classroom can be a site of liberation and individual empowerment. The discourse, approach, and method Ms. Greene employed in her music classroom are largely representative of the current approach in music teacher education and K-12 music classrooms in the United States. The students used the word “different” to describe the ways in which movement was absent from their music classroom experience compared with their home musical experience. The implicit message the students internalized was that their musical epistemologies were inappropriate for this particular music setting. Gustafson attempts to unravel the hegemonic justification of racist discourses of appropriateness and superiority. The harm created by an ontological distance between teacher and student is that it allows the teacher to “other” the student—to ignore the student’s humanity. Music curriculum and pedagogy based on a Eurocentric musical epistemology partitions music learning into the elements of music—harmony, melody, rhythm, among others—which can be separately studied.
