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Fishers of song: Music education and community in Andavadoaka, Madagascar
Abstract
What might pre-service music teachers learn by stepping outside the formal curriculum? In between semesters student teaching in New York City, I investigated music education practices in the Vezo fishing village of Andavadoaka, Madagascar. By investigating how this community practices advanced musicianship learned primarily outside the classroom, I aimed to understand what formal music educators can do to improve musicianship in our communities. This research focuses on the teaching and learning of music as observed through one community institution (the Catholic school) and three knowledgeable, local music makers (Gustin, Felicia, and Sylvera). Through ethnography and oral history, I asked, what is the relationship between community and music education practices in Andavadoaka? And, how do my observations as a cultural outsider provide insight into the relationship between community and music education practices in the formal, school settings where I was learning to teach? Three themes emerged from these experiences. By imbuing our classrooms with a participatory ethos, practicing music in a richer cultural context, and tapping into the social networks inhabited by our students, we can musically develop our communities far beyond their current limits.
Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative methodology. I conduct an urban ethnography and autoethnography of the metropolitan blasé as a public attitude of indifference to articulate an alternative, quotidian approach to ethnography that better captures social embeddedness, meaning-creation, and how contexts should drive data collection, analysis, and method-selection.
This autoethnographic study investigated possibility of incorporating indigenous pedagogies into Ugandan school music and, possibly, general education. School music education in Uganda currently occurs within a colonial-influenced system that does not connect with learners’ indigenous cultures. The colonial system fosters belief that “western” is modernity and “indigenous” is backwardness that should be erased. School music learning is currently experienced in a teacher-dominated, “banking” (Freire, 1970) school system that disempowers learners and produces graduates who cannot address the musical needs of their worlds. Ugandan government measures to improve music and general education have not improved the situation. Literature on the role that indigenous pedagogies could play in a contemporary music education is limited. Through this study, I sought to understand what might happen when indigenous education pedagogies are incorporated in a contemporary, formal school setting. Informed by relevant literature, I interrogated and analyzed my own learning and teaching experiences in Ugandan communities and schools and found that embedding indigenous learning and teaching processes in music classrooms fostered growth in learner leadership, ownership, agency, and identity in the context of mutually shared participatory experiences that learners found relevant and meaningful—experiences that engendered joyful, passionate, collaborative learning, and reification of reflective practice among learners.
The teaching of multicultural music, and to a lesser extent popular music, has been the stated goal of music education policy makers for many decades. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to estimate the amount and percentage of time music education majors in a university teacher education program spent on 13 styles of music in history, theory and performance courses during a four-year program, both in and out of class. Subjects were the entire population of undergraduate pre-service music teachers from one large university music school in the southwestern United States (N = 80). Estimates were provided by the course instructors. Subjects spent widely disparate amounts of time on musics of the western art (92.83%), western non-art (6.94%), and non-western (.23%) traditions, with little time (.54%) devoted to popular music. The discussion centers on solutions sometimes proffered for musically unbalanced music teacher education programs, implications relative to accreditation and national music standards in the USA, and changes implemented by the institution under study.
The preparation of novice teachers is dominated by psychological notions almost to the exclusion of other social science paradigms. The perspective that is least likely to be evident in teacher preparation is that of anthropology. However, prospective and novice teachers regularly and loosely use the word “culture” as an explanation for student patterns of behavior they cannot explain. This discussion focuses on the ways prospective and novice teachers construct culture simultaneously as both the problem and the answer to their struggles with students different from themseles.
Building upon the work of Ladson–Billings, Lind and McKoy, and Shaw, our proposed framework takes into consideration the depth and breadth of musical experiences and contexts, musical content, and the diversity of musical cultures. The proposed framework includes four quadrants: (a) teacher competencies, (b) informed choices, (c) authenticity, and (d) holistic and comparative lessons. The framework provides K–16 teachers with tangible, accessible, and actionable methods for implementing a teaching pedagogy that has often been misunderstood or implemented without fidelity, and therefore ineffective. Each quadrant’s description and detail provide educators with guidance, supporting their individual musical growth, facilitating authentic relationships with students, authentic performances, and careful idea development for lesson planning that is inclusive of multiple musical perspectives and origins. Muñiz and Richards et al. acknowledged that community support and teacher capacity are essential for culturally relevant pedagogy to be implemented effectively, thus increasing students’ academic growth.
The Vezo, a fishing people of western Madagascar, are known as 'the people who struggle with the sea'. Dr Astuti explores their identity showing that it is established through what people do rather than being determined by descent. Vezo identity is a 'way of doing' rather than a 'state of being', performative rather than ethnic. However, her innovative analysis of Vezo kinship also uncovers an opposite form of identity based on descent, which she argues is the identity of the dead. By looking at key mortuary rituals that engage the relationship between the living and the dead, Dr Astuti develops a dual model of the Vezo person: the one defined contextually in the present, the other determined by the past.
While the United States is becoming increasingly diverse with regard to race, ethnicity, primary language, religion, and culture, many educators feel unprepared to teach students from socioculturally diverse backgrounds. In this case study, I explored the impact of a cultural immersion field experience on preservice music educators’ beliefs and assumptions about teaching students whose backgrounds differ from their own. Nine undergraduate music education majors were placed with one of two elementary music teachers in a community that has a large proportion of Arab and Muslim Americans and immigrants. Participants did not immediately recognize the ways in which culture affected music teaching and learning. Through firsthand experiences in classrooms and the local community, however, they developed greater empathy for and understanding of Arab and Muslim students, began to recognize their own implicit biases, and developed a deepened understanding of the impact of culturally responsive teaching in the music classroom.
This article has its basis in the author’s own growing annoyance at so-called “sandwich” programmes, where young academics from developing countries study and learn theories at universities in the Global North, then go to their own countries for fieldwork – only to return to the host country to fit their data into the theories of the Global North. The purpose of this article is twofold. The author’s first aim is to demonstrate that the thinking and concepts of some African educational thinkers such as, for example, Julius Nyerere, fit the educational reality in Africa better than those of Western thinkers, and that these concepts should therefore be used. Second, she argues that when it comes to building theories from the ground, the life experiences of Africans (in terms of everyday reality, indigenous knowledge, cultural transmission, community engagement etc.) should be taken into account. She explains why, through her own teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, she became interested in the qualitative research method called autoethnography. She also draws on her experience of teaching qualitative research methods at a number of historically black universities in South Africa. She notes a recent positive development in the availability of a promising postgraduate programme with an authoethnographic approach. Entitled “The Narrative Study of Lives” and launched by the South African University of the Free State (UFS) Department of Sociology in 2012, this Master’s and PhD programme builds entirely on African experiences. In the last part of her article, the author applies an autoethnographic approach to the study of languages in Africa. She explains that some of her Tanzanian students grew up with several Tanzanian languages simultaneously, so that Western linguists’ terms like “mother tongue”, first and second language do not make sense to them. She also introduces the concept of ubuntu translanguaging, an effective practice of purposeful juxtaposition of languages observed in African empirical research.
This article interrogates assumptions of comparative education research and international education in the transfer of policies and practices generally in North-South relations within the context of structural inequality. The pursuit of learning in different educational traditions and the quest for comparison are examined. Aspects of meanings of individual sociogeographic and intellectual journeys within the global context are analyzed in articulating the patterns of contradictions in temporality and epistemology in knowledge production, focusing on agency, legitimacy, and ownership. Issues critically examined include what ought to be the guiding principles toward new transformative relational theories and methodologies of understanding education in formerly colonized societies, including Africa. The Ubuntu paradigm is articulated as an alternative framework for defining relations within and across the borders of local and global spaces, as a permanent corrective measure that can offer possibilities of growth and renewal to the field of comparative and international education. © 2016 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
Taking the position that “critical pedagogy” and “place-based education” are mutually supportive educational traditions, this author argues for a conscious synthesis that blends the two discourses into a critical pedagogy of place. An analysis of critical pedagogy is presented that emphasizes the spatial aspects of social experience. This examination also asserts the general absence of ecological thinking demonstrated in critical social analysis concerned exclusively with human relationships. Next, a discussion of ecological place-based education is offered. Finally, a critical pedagogy of place is defined. This pedagogy seeks the twin objectives of decolonization and “reinhabitation” through synthesizing critical and place-based approaches. A critical pedagogy of place challenges all educators to reflect on the relationship between the kind of education they pursue and the kind of places we inhabit and leave behind for future generations.
L'étude systématique de la musique africaine a commencé au cours de la première décennie du vingtième siècle quand les ethnographes sont rentrés en Europe, rapportant des enregistrements effectués sur place pour les faire analyser par les musicologues. Les perspectives européennes sur la musique africaine se sont progressivement élargies depuis que l'avènement de l'ethnomusicologie dans les années 50 a encouragé les experts à entreprendre leurs propres études de terrain en Afrique. Des études historiques basées sur l'évidence révélée par la tradition orale et les sources ethnographiques se sont concentrées sur une large gamme de problèmes liés à l'acculturation, à l'exercice de la performance, au style, à l'organologie et aux modes de communication. Parmi les questions pratiques qui restent encore à résoudre, se trouvent l'ethnocentrisme cognitif, l'applicabilité de la recherche ethnomusicologique au développement culturel africain, le rôle changeant de l'Africain dans la recherche ethnomusicologique, et le besoin d'établir le dialogue avec les musiciens africains et les experts.
It is important that we, as a profession, are conversant with our pedagogical history. Too often we reinvent and reassess that which has been established past practices. As Fonder suggests, “knowledge of past successes and failures can clarify decisions for future policy — and possibly spark innovative new ideas and strategies”.1 It is hoped that music educators today will find in this exploration a consideration of the use of music as a part of an evangelical and imperial drive. Music is still used in this way — to evoke ideas of religion and patriotism in children. In mid-nineteenth century England, John Curwen (1816-1880) developed the Tonic Sol-fa method. This pedagogy was, from the outset, intended as both a systematic method of class instruction in music and an aid to worship. Sarah Glover (1786-1867), the originator of the system Curwen modified, began her educational experiments in music to improve the singing of psalms (or psalmody). The Tonic Sol-fa system was taken up by various missionary societies, the first being the London Missionary Society (LMS). In 1862 this society sent the Reverend Robert Toy to meet Curwen to learn the method of teaching singing. Toy then travelled to Madagascar where the method became part of the evangelising, worship and teaching undertaken by the missionaries. The nineteenth century history of Madagascar is outlined to contextualise the discussion of the use of the Tonic Sol-fa method and Christian hymns in Malagasy society.
In multicultural Australia, the development of positive intercultural attitudes is essential in the creation of a harmonious society. Music education is a powerful medium to address cultural inclusivity. The 2005 National Review of School Music Education challenges Australian higher education institutions to prepare programs that explore multiculturalism to engender tolerance. This research explored how final year teacher education students at Monash University and Deakin University (Victoria, Australia) engage with music of other cultures and how this affects their understanding of cultural diversity in school music. From 2005 to 2008, teacher education students undertaking music methodologies were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. The data collected from the interviews were transcribed and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, and from these data, we developed patterns of meaning that are reported thematically: student teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, and understandings of multiculturalism and the classroom realities of multiculturalism.The findings contribute to how we, as tertiary educators, evaluate our role and programs.
Based on ongoing field research into Namibian music and dance, this article deliberates on play as an important component of childhood and an important element of Namibian performance. Considering that socialization is often described as the fundamental goal of African education, and that play is central to Namibian musical performances, this article investigates traditional functions of music as a means of socialization. Because play reflects and responds to societal value systems, the meaning of play is briefly explored, and the characteristics of play in Namibia are described in detail. The paper then proposes the increased use of play in African music education and advances the proposition in terms of the construction of a musical world and identity. The construction of a person's musical world is described in terms of the mental templates formed by a specific cultural group and by the environmental rules of play, which establish the meta-communicative frame. The article concludes with a summary ofgeneral contributions play, as a means of learning, being, and expressing can make to music education.
The teaching of qualitative analysis in the social sciences is rarely undertaken in a structured way. This handbook is designed to remedy that and to present students and researchers with a systematic method for interpreting qualitative data', whether derived from interviews, field notes, or documentary materials. The special emphasis of the book is on how to develop theory through qualitative analysis. The reader is provided with the tools for doing qualitative analysis, such as codes, memos, memo sequences, theoretical sampling and comparative analysis, and diagrams, all of which are abundantly illustrated by actual examples drawn from the author's own varied qualitative research and research consultations, as well as from his research seminars. Many of the procedural discussions are concluded with rules of thumb that can usefully guide the researchers' analytic operations. The difficulties that beginners encounter when doing qualitative analysis and the kinds of persistent questions they raise are also discussed, as is the problem of how to integrate analyses. In addition, there is a chapter on the teaching of qualitative analysis and the giving of useful advice during research consultations, and there is a discussion of the preparation of material for publication. The book has been written not only for sociologists but for all researchers in the social sciences and in such fields as education, public health, nursing, and administration who employ qualitative methods in their work.
In Africa, as in many countries of the South, democratization is sometimes perceived as a process modeled upon outside – and specifically Northern – experience. Formal civic education programs in those countries arguably reflect the same bias and have not always been notably successful. Yet there are rich patterns of civic involvement and democratic process in African culture and in the myriad ways in which it has adapted to development challenges, often more successfully reflected in non-formal and informal education endeavors. This article reports on a comparative study of related experience in Madagascar and Sahelian West Africa and draws conclusions regarding ways to draw inspiration for school-based civic education from such ground-level sources.