Culturally Responsive Pedagogical/Andragogical Context Knowledge in Choral Music

Responding to the diverse strengths, interests, and needs of musicians is a critical issue in music making and has been forefront in the scholarly dialogue. One significant current in this discourse is culturally responsive education. Framed as culturally responsive teaching, culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and other related terms, these asset focused approaches are not synonymous. As Julia Shaw recently noted in this journal, “scholars who coined these terms have used them in nuanced ways to refer to precise concepts.” There are, however, shared foundations among them, including recognition of the impact our cultural background has on teaching and learning, and commitment to addressing the misalignment between dominant school structures and students’ cultural frames. These approaches also share similarities in that they are multidimensional, representing an attitude toward teaching rather than a set of specific pedagogical strategies.

In 2019, Joshua Russell and I investigated music teacher educator perceptions of culturally responsive education (CRE), an umbrella term that draws on the connections between models of responsivity, such as their emphasis on employing students’ funds of knowledge.

We discovered that while music teacher educators were familiar with the concept, their engagement with CRE appeared to be surface level, not an embedding of CRE into their practice. To encourage a deeper understanding and integration of CRE into practice, we proposed the Culturally Responsive Pedagogical/Andragogical Context Knowledge (CRPACK) framework. In this article, I will describe the Culturally Responsive Pedagogical/Andragogical Context Knowledge framework and how it might be applied in choral music.
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Read the full article in the March/April 2024 issue of Choral Journal. acda.org/choraljournal