Sound Beginnings: Learning, Communicating, and Making Sense with Sound

Abstract

The ongoing work by educators responding to calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion in music education shows the breadth of difficult work that has been accomplished as well as the challenging work that lies ahead. Our work explores efforts to rethink music education—for all—from the ground up, which requires disrupting many of the norms through which music education has been conventionally understood. In this article, we bring together lessons learned to offer five recommendations for music pedagogy and sound-based inquiry that support a more inclusive understanding of music—one that situates aural/sound/music learning experiences as actively critical and collaborative practices. We suggest that by developing a contextualized, community-based, learner-oriented model, we might be better equipped to create opportunities for all learners.

Performing Without Sound: Using Sign Language to Teach Expressive Qualities of Music

“…According to Liu (2020), “The curricula we choose carry specific cultural values and illustrate a particular way of seeing the world” (p. 97). Exposing our students to sign language as a legitimate option for music performance broadens our classrooms to consider the ways all people can perform music and can help to break some of the “gendered, racist, and ableist realities of many students’ musical education” (Thumlert et al, 2020, p. 67). Traditionally, music education and music performance is considered to be only for people who can hear and excludes the deaf (Kim, 2015).…”