Moving beyond resilience education: musical counterstorytelling

ABSTRACT

Education discourse has recently turned toward resilience and grit. This article critiques the neoliberalism embedded in resilience education and the manner in which a resilience focus encourages docility, adaptation and vulnerability in youth in response to oppressive conditions rather than addressing oppression directly. As a site of resilience for marginalised youth, music is implicated in resilience education’s failure to address systemic oppression. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), as a music educator, I challenge the tendency of resilience education to pathologise youth and individualise systemic issues and put forward songwriting within music education as a means to shift a pedagogy of vulnerability to a pedagogy of oppression that interrupts dominant narratives. I assert that a pedagogy of oppression through songwriting allows youth to create powerful musical counterstories that shift deficit discourse to focus on strengths.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience education
• neoliberalism
• music education
• counterstorytelling
• songwriting
• hip-hop

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Juliet Hess is an assistant professor of music education at Michigan State University, having previously taught elementary and middle school music in Toronto. Her book, Music Education for Social Change: Constructing an Activist Music Education, explores the intersection of activism, critical pedagogy, and music education. Juliet received her PhD in Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include anti-oppression education, activism in music and music education, music education for social justice, and the question of ethics in world music study.

Notes

1 Mills (1967) makes a distinction between private troubles and public issues and notes that educators and social workers often focus on individual problems rather than focusing on the structural issues (534).

2 I note here that rather than expecting youth to simply take up this activist position, as educators, we might simply provide some examples and make it clear that this counternarrative would be welcomed rather than shut down.

3 One youth songwriting group wrote the lyrics ‘Sickouts gone crazy, city’s in a/Panic. Ghetto life’s gone manic’ (Hess 2018, 18). Sickouts were a regular topic of conversation throughout the program. On 3 days in January 2016 and 2 days in May 2016, Detroit teachers called in sick en masse to protest conditions in schools that included roaches, rodents, water damage and mould, massive class sizes, and not being paid for days worked (Carter Andrews, Bartell, and Richmond 2016; Pearson 2016).

4 Another songwriting group wrote ‘We’re all stuck in time/Some live on a dime’ (Hess 2018, 17).

5 See Hess (2018) for an extended discussion of The Verses Project.