AUSTIN SHOWEN & CATHY BENEDICT
Austin Showen is Assistant Professor and Director of Music Education at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV. He teaches general music pedagogy, Kodály pedagogy, elementary education, music theory & aural skills, and is passionate about building collaborative artistic communities that promote critical and creative inquiry. Throughout his career, Austin has taught pre-kindergarten through graduate level courses and community music in public school, university, healthcare, and church settings in West Virginia and Arizona. He holds a B.M.E. from Shepherd University, M.M. from Capital University, and Ph.D. from Arizona State University. As a scholar, Austin focuses on the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, and curriculum studies. He explores how our ideas about the nature of music, learning, and aesthetic experience afford and constrain possibilities for artistic-pedagogic engagement both in and outside of schools. He is also interested in promoting creative approaches to music education that incorporate popular music, songwriting, and contemporary forms of musicianship. Austin has presented his research at many state, national, and international conferences and has published in the journal Leisure Sciences.
|
Cathy Benedict joined the music education faculty at Western University, starting July 2015 as faculty and Director of Research. She has taught undergraduate and graduate classes such as Elementary Pedagogy, Orff, Curriculum Design, Critical Readings in Music Education and Music Education and Special Needs Students. She has presented multiple workshops to both national and international audiences on topics as varied as pedagogy and pride, thinking transitions rather than classroom management, the interrogation of classroom rules as policy, the social contract and utopian visions, and music in the elementary classroom and integrated practices. Her scholarly interests lay in facilitating music education environments in which students take on the perspective of a justice-oriented citizen, to this end her research agenda focuses on the processes of education and the ways in which teachers and students interrogate taken-for-granted, normative practices. Cathy has published in such journals as Philosophy of Music Education Review, Music Education Research, and Research Studies in Music Education, the Brazilian journal ABEM, co-edited the journal Theory Into Practice and the 2012 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook (Teachers College Press), and most recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice and Music Education (Oxford University Press). For more information, see: http://www.cathybenedict.com/
|
Living with our Monsters: Reading Literacy [Kodály] through Posthumanism
Centuries of colonialism, humanism, rational science, and “capitalist ruination” (Latour et al., 2018; Pignarre and Stengers, 2011) have created a multi-headed monster named epistemology (Latour, 1999; Stengers, 1997; Adorno, 1970). One of its most insidious heads is called literacy: a colonial conceptual apparatus used to qualify a narrow set of knowledge practices as offering the correct view of reality while calling all others irrational, “primitive,” or illiterate (Anzaldúa, 1987; Stengers, 1997; Viveiros de Castro, 2014). In music education, the name Kodály has become shorthand for elementary pedagogy focused exclusively on Western (Euroclassical) tonal music literacy as a means “…to make the widest range of people participants in musical culture” (Kodály, 1974, 36). In Kodály’s words—heeded faithfully by his followers—this “urgent task” can only be accomplished through “the struggle to move from an illiterate culture into one with writing…” (195), because even though “illiterate” musicians “accomplished wonders,” “such can be considered only half-musicians today; they can never become conscious, cultured musicians” (197).
In classroom practice, Kodály literacy is predicated on an established “sequence of concepts” linked to the signs and symbols of Western (Euroclassical) tonal music. This step-by-step sequencing of musical “elements,” focused solely on representation of a particular kind of music presented in a particular kind of way, is centered around the “illiterate” human child progressing toward literacy. As method and practice, it consistently privileges a set of narrowly human (read: White, Euro-American) knowledge practices and places music literally at the disposal of the learner where nonhuman matter(s) are “deployed only as a means to develop increased accuracy” (Hargraves, 2018, 187). Kodály—as an “order-word” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 75) that compels belief in what music/musicking is and commands the “proper” way to understand music—not only fixes the possibilities and multiple meanings of music/musicking but arrests the creative wonderments of learners.
In this presentation, we read Kodály (i.e., sequential method for teaching musical “elements”) diffractively (Barad, 2014) with posthumanist philosophies in order to “dislodge” (Hargraves, 2018, 196) our understandings of Kodály as the only literacy available to music teachers. For us, posthumanist philosophies provide important theoretical matter(s) for grappling with the monstrous consequences of the imposition of Western epistemology upon the world. Posthuman philosophies reveal a universe that is always-already “reading” and “writing” itself into being, where all of matter participates and is entangled in processes of knowing-being and being-known (Kirby, 2011; Barad, 2017; Caputo, 2019). They allow us to see knowing as relational being-and-becoming-with human and nonhuman others, decolonizing the ways in which beings come to know. Thus, reading Kodály diffractively with posthumanist philosophies means to read both as they weave in out of each other, fracturing the linear, progressive fixation of an education in music. It enables us to pose new questions about literacy(ies) so that fellow Kodály educators, preservice teachers, and critical wonderers/wanderers/learners might create new patterns of knowing-being and being-known for and with human and nonhuman others that sustain “worlding and re-worlding for flourishing” (Haraway, 2016, 96).
Bibliography:
Adorno, Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1982.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Barad, Karen. “What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments.” In Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms, edited by Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 21-88. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014) : 168-187.
Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Hargraves, Vicki. “The Posthuman Condition of Ethics in Early Childhood Literacy: Order-in(g) Be(e)ing Literacy,” in Posthumanism and Literacy Education: Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies, edited by Candace R. Kuby, Karen Spector, Jaye Johnson Thiel. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Kodály, Zoltán. The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1974.
Latour, Bruno, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, and Nils Bubandt. “Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse” Ethnos 83, no. 3 (2018) : 587–606.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Pignarre, Phillip and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Translated by Andrew Goffey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Stengers, Isabelle. Power and Invention: Situating Science. Translated by Paul Bains. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014.
In classroom practice, Kodály literacy is predicated on an established “sequence of concepts” linked to the signs and symbols of Western (Euroclassical) tonal music. This step-by-step sequencing of musical “elements,” focused solely on representation of a particular kind of music presented in a particular kind of way, is centered around the “illiterate” human child progressing toward literacy. As method and practice, it consistently privileges a set of narrowly human (read: White, Euro-American) knowledge practices and places music literally at the disposal of the learner where nonhuman matter(s) are “deployed only as a means to develop increased accuracy” (Hargraves, 2018, 187). Kodály—as an “order-word” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 75) that compels belief in what music/musicking is and commands the “proper” way to understand music—not only fixes the possibilities and multiple meanings of music/musicking but arrests the creative wonderments of learners.
In this presentation, we read Kodály (i.e., sequential method for teaching musical “elements”) diffractively (Barad, 2014) with posthumanist philosophies in order to “dislodge” (Hargraves, 2018, 196) our understandings of Kodály as the only literacy available to music teachers. For us, posthumanist philosophies provide important theoretical matter(s) for grappling with the monstrous consequences of the imposition of Western epistemology upon the world. Posthuman philosophies reveal a universe that is always-already “reading” and “writing” itself into being, where all of matter participates and is entangled in processes of knowing-being and being-known (Kirby, 2011; Barad, 2017; Caputo, 2019). They allow us to see knowing as relational being-and-becoming-with human and nonhuman others, decolonizing the ways in which beings come to know. Thus, reading Kodály diffractively with posthumanist philosophies means to read both as they weave in out of each other, fracturing the linear, progressive fixation of an education in music. It enables us to pose new questions about literacy(ies) so that fellow Kodály educators, preservice teachers, and critical wonderers/wanderers/learners might create new patterns of knowing-being and being-known for and with human and nonhuman others that sustain “worlding and re-worlding for flourishing” (Haraway, 2016, 96).
Bibliography:
Adorno, Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1982.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Barad, Karen. “What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments.” In Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms, edited by Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 21-88. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014) : 168-187.
Caputo, John D. Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Hargraves, Vicki. “The Posthuman Condition of Ethics in Early Childhood Literacy: Order-in(g) Be(e)ing Literacy,” in Posthumanism and Literacy Education: Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies, edited by Candace R. Kuby, Karen Spector, Jaye Johnson Thiel. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Kodály, Zoltán. The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1974.
Latour, Bruno, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, and Nils Bubandt. “Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse” Ethnos 83, no. 3 (2018) : 587–606.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Pignarre, Phillip and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Translated by Andrew Goffey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Stengers, Isabelle. Power and Invention: Situating Science. Translated by Paul Bains. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014.