Envisioning imaginary spaces for musicking : equipping students for leaping into the unexplored

Abstract

In this article, we argue that music teachers working in a fast-changing society could focus on envisioning their students' imaginary spaces for engaging with music and equipping them for leaping into what for the students would be the musically hitherto unexplored. Taking Christopher Small's writings as a point of departure, we contest his recently expressed view that music education should be taken out of schools, and lean on his concept of musicking to explain how school-based music education practices can be transformed from spaces dominated by enforced structural demands to spaces in which teachers and students engage in a joint exploration of musical identities, relationships and possibilities, and which then may provide something unique for the school culture to retain. Leading a discussion of how music teachers may reach the understanding of themselves as transformative intellectuals or change agents, and hence facilitate and lead such reconstructions of their own practices, we also attend to the frameworks of critical pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching.