Music Education in a Liquid Social World: The Nuances of Teaching with Students of Immigrant and Refugee Backgrounds
Abstract
This integrated-article dissertation explores the multiple ways in which music teachers, community facilitators, and students engage in music teaching and learning in social contexts prone to change due to human mobility. Drawing upon Bauman’s sociological understanding of modern societies as liquid and the larger implications of processes of human mobility in schools and communities, this research focuses on exploring music education as it happens within an increasingly diversifying Canadian society.
In the first article, a philosophical research study, I conceptualize the notion of coping with discomfort as a form of response possibly experienced by music teachers. Here, I draw from psychological understandings of coping and a Foucauldian understanding of discomfort to view coping mechanisms as a form of pedagogy that may help or hinder music teachers in their responses to newcomer students in the music classroom. The second article, a multiple case study, uses and expands this framework to analyze the current pedagogies, reflective practices and adaptive processes experienced by two school music teachers working in highly diversifying school settings. The third article, an autoethnography, sets the investigative parameters of my own experiences teaching music at the Youth Music Program (YMP), a program of music education developed for newcomer children and youth in partnership with two community centres that provide settlement services in Canada. Finally, in the fourth article, I focus solely on the perspectives and experiences of newcomer youth and outline their understandings during and after their participation at the YMP.
The findings from all these articles draw attention to the nuances of individual perceptions, assumptions and preconceptions that guide actions. I emphasize the relevance of reflective practices in the processes of adaptation that may be experienced by music teachers and facilitators when engaging with the multiplicities of their students, and the importance of considering the particularities of developing more complex understandings of pedagogy and processes of reflection and adaptation.