Leading Music Education International Conference

The Implications of South African Children’s Multimodal Musical Games for Music Education

My paper is based on ethnographic research into South African urban township children’s musical games. Young learners’ unsupervised, self-choreographed and designed musical games are rich music-dance practices which, I suggest, constitute important kinds of local musical knowledge. As such, I propose that these games are potential resources for music teaching and learning that may be ‘recruited’ in different ways. I am interested both in how these musical games are hybrid, mixed multimodal forms specifically located in South African township culture, and their implications for pedagogy. In this paper, I present some of the games that are particularly interesting in their combination of expressive, artistic modes in complex ways. I consider them with relation to their cultural and musical hybridity, the artistic capacities they demonstrate, and how children’s musical games relate to their identities and meaning-making. I argue for the need to engage with indigenous cultural practices, and acknowledge the richness of children’s embodied musical knowledge as a way of producing new pedagogical and performance possibilities.