Unlearning Whiteness, rethinking race issues in graduate music education

Abstract

This paper examines the experiences of music education graduate students and their instructor during a fifteen-week seminar course entitled Race issues in music teaching. Excerpts from students’ journal entries and the instructor's responses to those journals are constructed in this paper as dialogue vignettes which provide insight into the process through which the students came to understand the notion of cultural Whiteness as embedded in North American society and education systems. As has been identified in previous studies (Rich & Cargile, 2004; Solomon, Portelli, & Daniel, 2005), students’ reactions to course readings about Whiteness ranged from denial to frustration to eventual acceptance of the concept of Whiteness, although due to the racial homogeneity of the students and their instructor, some reactions contrast with those described in the previous studies, which were conducted with participants of more diverse racial identities. Analysis of the journals indicates the emergence of renewed commitments to social justice by the students as a result of course readings and discussions. In addition, the need for music teacher education to offer the kinds of experiences that better prepare students to teach in increasingly diverse settings emerged as a theme.

Notes

1. After week 4.

2. R's journal offset the words as shown here, each word separately enclosed in quotation marks.

3. See Bowman (2005) for an explanation of the differences between ‘training’ and ‘education’.