Inuit student teachers' agency, positioning and symbolic action: reflections from a qallunaat on music teaching in the Canadian Arctic

Abstract

This article examines how three Inuit student teachers in the Nunavut Teacher Education Program invested their social and cultural capital during a music course for classroom teachers, which the author taught in the Canadian Arctic. She describes how, through the musical games they invented for use in Inuit classrooms, these students positioned themselves as agents of their own learning and as wielders of power in the context of emergent Inuit education. Three examples of their invented musical games are presented to illustrate these processes. The author concludes that in increasingly culturally diverse teaching contexts it is important to be conscious of our students' habitus -the embedded history, the unconscious set of ideas, beliefs and emotions that guide how we think, feel and act -in our decisions regarding content, goals and evaluations of achievement.

Facing the Indigenous ‘Other’: Culturally Responsive Research and Pedagogy in Music Education

“…As mentioned earlier, some researchers and agencies have sought to decolonise and indigenise curriculums (Dillon & Chapman, 2005; Russell, 2006a). Writing generally, Russell (2006a) argues that a decolonised curriculum needs to be co-constructed by teacher and students, noting that, ‘When curriculum builds upon the kinds of experiences that students have identified as meaningful, there is potential for increasing their awareness of their own sociocultural positionings’ (p. 239). Though situated in the tertiary context, Dillon and Chapman (2005) investigated with the Oodgeroo unit the formal process involved in indigenising the music curriculum at Queensland University of Technology.…”

‘Now can I watch my video?’: Exploring musical play through video sharing and social networking in an early childhood music class

“…Interestingly many of the main categories appear in both the play-enhancing and play-inhibiting analyses. Upon further analysis, the idea of agency, or power control, and authority (Russell, 2006), arose as major differences between the two areas, and issues of agency seemed to influence whether a particular behavior, such as adult involvement, created a play-enhancing or play-inhibiting effect. In a situation in which a child had more agency, such as an in-class activity in which children chose a movement for each successive verse of a song game, adult involvement seemed to encourage children to continue, extend, or deepen their play.…”

Enacting curriculum ‘in a good way:’ Indigenous knowledge, pedagogy, and worldviews in British Columbia music education classes

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