Listening To Their Voices: An Ethnographic Study of Children\u27s Values and Meaning Ascribed to Learning World Music in Elementary School General Music

The primary purpose of this ethnographic study is to examine the values and meaning children ascribe to learning world music in an elementary school general music program. This research seeks to explore the potential of world music pedagogies for deepening children\u27s understanding of music and its sociocultural context more completely. The participants in this study included fourth-grade students and their music teacher who designed and taught a Music-Culture Curricular Unit on Afro-Brazilian traditions. Data include field notes of music classes collected during seven weeks of observations, focus group and individual interviews with fourth-grade students, audio and video recordings, conversations with the music teacher, documents, and a researcher journal. Children\u27s voices come alive in interview excerpts and narrative descriptions of the music classes. For the children in this study learning world music meant (a) discovering new sonic features, (b) engaging with language and history, and (c) connecting to the world. The values children ascribed to learning world music were (a) making music together, (b) learning about the sonic features of music, and (c) learning about the cultural context of the music. A deeper understanding of the values and meaning children ascribe to music has the potential to promote a holistic music education that features musicianship, creative thinking, and knowledge of history and culture

“Because Songs Reflect the People:” Archival Recordings of Children’s Music as Pathway to Respectful Resonance

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021The musical education of children holds potential for their development of cultural awareness, understanding, and empathy, much of which is dependent upon the integrity of the resources and pedagogical techniques that teachers employ. The archival recordings of ethnomusicologists present rich prospects for teaching and learning music and culture, and for piquing children’s curiosity and increased respect for children across the world. Through the digital-sharing of recordings of a globally diverse gamut of children’s expressive practices and an honoring of children’s agency in determining pedagogical strategies for their interaction with music and its sociocultural features, this dissertation examines a pathway for children’s developing relationships with children, their music, and their cultural values and circumstances. This research proceeded over a period of six months, documenting curiosities, creativities, and music-culture conceptualizations by 10- and 11-year-old children enrolled in a fifth-grade class in a U.S. based public elementary school. A tripartite “remixed ethnography” was developed, entailing the application of techniques of ethnography, virtual ethnography (and netnography), and autoethnography, in order to examine children’s visits to the sonic heritages of other children nearby and culturally (and geographically) distant locations. The research proceeded in two phases, a pre-COVID in-person and classroom-centered discovery of children’s musical cultures through large- and small-group projects and a COVID-necessitated virtual module of music-culture explorations and creative ventures via online platforms. The process of children’s agentive role in their discovery of music and culture was closely documented, resulting in a recognition of the capacity of archival recordings of children’s songs to serve as gateway into culturally unfamiliar music and to the cultural situations and surroundings of the children whose voices were featured. Over the course of the two phases of experience and study, the fifth-grade children became increasingly attentive to sonic details in the replication of the songs they were learning, as they were also careful that their creative re-arrangements of studied songs did not sonically veer too far from the children whose voices they were listening to. Moreoever, the young students demonstrated a growing consciousness and ever-deepening connection to the children and their cultural circumstances. They developed a solid state of respectful resonance with the children and their cultures through their songs, highlighting the powerful of school musical experiences to build relationships and solidarities, child-to-child and culture-to-culture