Meaningfulness and relevance of a student-planned social justice choral event: how American high school students used choir to tell their own stories
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Abstract
In the US, many school music programs teach in a monocultural and hegemonic manner that quiets student voice. I strove to encourage student voice in my choral classroom by inviting students to plan their own social justice choral concert on a topic of their choosing. My practices were grounded in care and storytelling, with aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and critical pedagogy. The culminating concert event functioned as performance, a social justice activity, and a collective narrative by the students about mental health. This qualitative instrumental case study examined the teaching practices and resulting concert event through observation notes, field notes, artifacts, and interviews. The study focused on three research questions: (1) How do students and audience members perceive meaningfulness and relevance of a student-led social justice concert that was the product of a dialogic choral project? (2) In what ways, if any, did power dynamics between teacher and students affect the classroom and learning? and (3) In what ways, if any, did student goals for the project promote student voice and empowerment through storytelling? Data were analyzed using both deductive and inductive methods.
Results indicated that students and audience members experienced meaningfulness and relevance at the concert event. Students also experienced meaningfulness, relevance, and empowerment through planning and rehearsal processes, and the shift to more dialogic teaching enabled students to tell their collective story. Care permeated the project. The connective tissue of care became the focus in the analysis and synthesis. Recognizing its importance, I created the Educational Care Spiral (ECS). The ECS builds upon research in caring about, caring for, and caring with to create a spiral that depicts the potential impact and influence of different types of care in the classroom.
The results of this research suggest a potential way forward for choral education that is more inclusive and empowering for diverse student populations, affording students opportunities to create dynamic and relevant concert programming rooted deeply in their communities. It is adaptable to varying school scenarios and programs and can be done with sensitivity and awareness of any potential cultural or political constraints, while potentially promoting the study and respect of varying musical styles, genres, and sounds. The ECS provides a tool for studying the influence and implementation of varying types of care in the music classroom, with the potential to inform teaching practices and provide educators with an accessible tool with which they can study their own teaching methods and classrooms.
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2026