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DECENTRING AND DISMANTLING: A CRITICAL AND RADICAL APPROACH TO DIVERSITY IN TERTIARY MUSIC EDUCATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2020

Joanna Ward
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Abstract

This article is a response, informed by my own recent experience of tertiary education in the UK, as well as my work as a composer, performer, researcher and activist, to the collection of articles published in TEMPO 292 addressing issues of diversity in music-making and tertiary music education in Australia. Though interventions have been successful in achieving better gender representation across musical contexts in Australian higher education institutions, I bring into question the long-term legitimacy of such empirical or revisionist approaches. Drawing on a range of feminist, poststructural, queer, and decolonial thought, I explore how conventional approaches to tertiary music education – both in terms of pedagogical methods, as well as assumed or prioritised content – enforce hegemonic and exclusionary value systems, hierarchies, ontologies and epistemologies. I also problematise some of the ways in which neoliberal and capitalist frameworks have become embedded within tertiary music education and advocate a process of destabilising and decentring assumed parameters, outlining how a critical, political and radical approach to music education might look.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 74 , Issue 294 , October 2020 , pp. 65 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

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