Keywords

1 Introduction

The role and impact that music and arts educators can exert on policy thinking and practice remains significantly underexplored. This presents an important gap globally – particularly in light of growing and challenging policy initiatives – that places educators of all stripes, and specially music educators, as targets of policy issues, such as teacher accountability and autonomy, work intensification, curricular streamlining, and assessment. Just as significantly, active policy participation remains underexplored in the arts fields regardless of evidence that policy thinking and activism can shape educational action and directly affect the nature, extent, and impact of our programs (Fulcher 1999).

Consequently, this chapter provides examples of current and promising practices in teacher education, while highlighting how policy thinking can help construct empowering conditions and experiences. To do so we use the notion of teacher-as-policy-maker as a guiding image for teacher preparation that need not and should not imply a distancing from practice. On the contrary, we argue, grounding practice in policy thinking is another way to acknowledge that critical dispositions – which can facilitate thoughtful, creative and engaged curricular work – are embedded in (and renewed by) a recognition of agency (by oneself and by others). Put in different terms, subaltern actors are also often non-innovative, non-participative actors. This is a logic of empowerment, one that ought to be inimical to any teacher education program, globally. Yet, its absence is easily uncovered.

Unfortunately – and counterproductively, in our opinion – a complexity surrounding teachers’ effects on school polity and its policies is generally absent from teacher education, and specifically absent from discussions over the development of “core practices.” In this chapter, we explore policy, music teacher education and power, as well as tensions between various policy-level demands. What might be the “core practices” of music teacher policy? How can music teacher educators help preservice and inservice music educators develop the necessary practices to effect changes in policy in music education and, more broadly, in education and their communities? How might discussion of teachers’ actions in relation to policy keep teacher practices “complex”?

Central to these questions of preparing educators for the profession of teaching, including policy action, is a tension between developing core practices while naming the limits and conditions that make those core practices possible. Addressing the complex tension between limits and possibilities is ultimately a process of discovering the discourses that drive policy within schools and examining how power drives these discourses. Raising awareness of the capacity that individuals have to respond to policies and policymaking decisions is one way to provide music education stakeholders with the needed confidence to interact with the policy process and thus more aptly impact their own professional conditions and re-establish the participative power of those at the center of the production of educational aims and ideals, that is, educators (Kos 2010; Schmidt and Robbins 2011; Schmidt 2017). This same capacity and process can also be extended to challenging issues such as interculturality and the demands it places within music education environs today (Westerlund et al. 2015). We argue, consequently, that if music educators can influence policy work they can also advance interculturality by means of including it in their own core practices.

This chapter proposes that, if teacher educators can navigate this tension between providing preservice teachers the capacity to develop ‘practical’ teacher practices and the necessary dispositions and abilities to question and affect policy, while naming the conditions and discourses embedded within policies (e.g. interculturality), then the payoff, can be rather strong. With successful navigation, teacher educators can bridge the divide between the demands that educational reform and its policies place on teachers; while working to reverse the narrowing space deemed appropriate for teacher action and practice.

2 Policy(ing), Core Practices and Interculturality

There is nascent evidence that discourses aimed at decoupling teachers from curricular, managerial and political power can indeed be assuaged. The 2013 Center for American Progress report focuses on the educator’s voice. It evidences in clear terms the capacity of the teacher-as-policy-maker:

Teacher leaders are capable of far more than feedback…we are capable of even more than closing the ‘implementation gap’ between a policy’s intended outcome and its actual impact on students in the classroom. We are capable of helping to design the kinds of systems our students need. (NNSTOY 2015, 10)

Acknowledging such capacity as existing and available, teacher educators are pushing back, with some challenging and exploring so-called “core practices.” Core practices are teacher practices that “occur with high frequency in teaching, are enacted across different curricula or instructional approaches, preserve the integrity and complexity of teaching, are research based, and have the potential to improve student achievement” (Whitcomb et al. 2009, 209). Core practices are ways to conceptualize the key abilities and skills that educators should develop. In addition to enacting practices, core practices might be a way for teacher educators and teachers to enact policies in the practice of teaching.

Core practices have limitations as well as potentials. Enacted without care, they can become part of the problem despite them being aimed to solve teacher accountability; core practices can be named, ossified, measured, and applied to teachers. However, enacted correctly – e.g. constructively, critically, openly – these practices are rendered sufficiently “complex” (Lampert et al. 2013). And, teacher educators, using the categories they use to construct “core,” “high-leverage” practices, can help teachers to become agents in the writing and developing of their core practices (Dutro and Cartun 2016). Such ‘writing up’ of one’s practices stands as a signpost for a more complex, educational and professional foundation, which could be seen as the formation of the teacher-as-policy-maker. This notion metaphorically represents a new parameter, or set of goals, for teacher education and professional development that are also in line with the general aims of this book and in particular the notion of interculturality.

According to UNESCO’s 2015 Guidelines on Intercultural Education, intercultural education goes beyond traditional aims of respecting and valuing diversity –while upholding them as a necessary baseline – as it needs to concern itself with “the learning environment as a whole, as well as other dimensions of educational processes, such as school life and decision making” (2015, 19). This concern for intercultural work framed as part of school life is a component of what we call below an engagement with policy networking and in alignment with how we situate our conception of the teacher-as-policy-maker. We do so by placing it within Weaver-Hightower’s ecological conceptualization of policy as “an extremely complex, often contradictory process that defies the commonly held image of singular purpose and open, effective planning” (2008, 153). By aligning diversity needs and teacher work with progressive understandings of policy (Ball 2009; Fischer 2003; Sabatier 2007), we place teachers within the ‘epistemic community’ (Haas 1992), appropriately having rights and claims over the curricular, but also, the political, structural and organizational aspects of schooling; that is, the territories within which power is exerted in educational settings. This view is critical of teacher-education policies that assume (or pretend to assume) value-neutral decision-making and those that ignore issues of power, arguing that such models (and teacher education programs that fail to challenge them) are not only ineffective but also regularly misleading, de facto facilitating the alienation of teachers from their own work.

Teachers have the framing capacity (Schmidt and Morrow 2015) to interact mindfully with policy thinking, engaging in what Bolman and Deal have called “mapping the political terrain” (2008, 2016). This is critical today as central challenges to intercultural education, such as higher mobility, forced migration, challenges to diversity, and growing cooptation of cultural forms, present themselves front and center in any responsible and equity-directed educational environment. Skills that would shape such capacity, however, need to be fostered and supported, and teacher education, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, is central to that enterprise. The educational leadership literature shows us how we can use policy as tactics, employing ideas, such as: controlling meeting agendas and decision-making processes; practicing cooptation, buffering, listening, diplomacy, humor, and strategic application of data; and using rewards and sanctions as well as avoidance (Blase and Blase 2002; Crow and Weindling 2010). Again, teacher education should dedicate time and efforts toward, “how teachers can learn policy tactics such as employing strategies for persuading others, circulating information, provoking and guiding discussions, asking critical questions, preaching, using language carefully, and employing government language.” But, we are also interested in a broader understanding of policy savvy that “expands policy into an alternative conceptualization of influence, change, and use of discursive practices, facilitating spaces for coalition work, framing and strategically organizing change, and developing the capacity to read political environs” (Schmidt 2017, 18). This disposition can be facilitated by the notion of core practices and can have meaningful impact on the enactment of educational aims based on intercultural understandings.

Before we get there however, we need to challenge the ways that policy is still traditionally seen. Our aim is to present policy as a more accessible, pragmatic and critical aspect of the education of teachers.

3 Reconsidering Policy and Political Membership

Writing at the edge of a historical shift in the way policy work was to be viewed, Aaron Wildavsky’s 1979 classic book Speaking Truth to Power challenges the rational choice and scientific rhetoric of policy thinking and the formalistic objectivism of its methodological approaches. In his own words:

This is my quarrel with the present paradigm of rationality: it accepts as immutable the very order of preference it is our purpose to change, and it regards as perfectly plastic the recalcitrant resources that always limit their realization. (Wildavsky 1979, 404)

His point is that policy is a political and thus a socio-cultural artifact. People and their preferences make policy. Objectivity and rationality have as much (or as little) to do with policy as rationalization and ideology. And this means that the hierarchizing of policy work is a construction of a particular, power-laden worldview, where the logic is as follows: some individuals ought to be the purveyors of policy, otherwise decision-making becomes inviable. Or, some individuals ought to be the purveyors of policy analysis, otherwise decision-making becomes unreliable. He set out to change the arena, arguing that challenging such a worldview is a matter of education, agency, and, naturally, hard work.

From Wildavsky and a subsequent line of policy thought (Ball 2009; Sabatier 2007; Schneider and Ingram 1997; Stone 2011) we learn that there is nothing wrong in equating policy with participatory engagement, even with activism. Indeed, Wildavsky argues that “when it becomes clear that people (re)make their social structure much like they (re)make their policies, the next stage in the study of public policy analysis as a social process will have begun” (1979, 405). This is in alignment with the notion of core practices we articulate here. For teacher educators, helping novice teachers enact policy thought in their teaching can be challenging (Schmidt 2017). Learning the ability to think globally, or on the “macro” level, while realizing results in the “micro” work of teaching is a messy process. What are the key skills and knowledge that teachers need to engage and enact policy? Even more difficult, how do teacher educators help novice teachers learn these skills and knowledge in ways that do not reduce the learning of teaching to a simplistic list that does not accurately prepare students for the complexity of professional teaching? The pedagogical approach to teacher education, known as core practices (Ball and Forzani 2009; Grossman and McDonald 2008; Lampert et al. 2013), attempts this challenging work of retaining complexity while designating and rehearsing those key practices. Core practices, then, are a promising arena where teachers can develop this agent-oriented, practice-based conception of policy, moving away from a removed view of policy as imposed by administrators or legislators on teachers.

Thus, these notions of policy as enacted and core practices as a way of developing this enactment are important for our discussion in three ways: First, by clarifying that all of us have a stake, and thus a responsibility, when it comes to policy. This means that in the context of schooling, teachers are both entitled to engage and responsible for engaging in policy thinking and policy work. To think of the teacher-as-policy-maker, then, is not to invent a utopian paradigm, but rather to unearth (or simply underscore) socio-political concerns such as those associated with interculturality, claiming space to enact them. Second, by clarifying that policies are not designed to act as their own causes. This means that, problematically, we have come to see policies as closed systems, working to sustain their own original intents and nothing else; today this is particularly compounded by the fact that economists (or economic thinking) are mostly leading the way on policy design and analysis (Fischer 2003). Finally, teacher educators can purposefully help novice teachers develop and rehearse the ability to create, shape and enact policy in practice.

The challenge, as the reader can already see, is that in the absence of the first element (e.g. individual and/or community agency/participation/understanding), the second element (e.g. the notion of policy as a closed system serving its own cause) becomes common sense. The logic is: experts spent a lot of time designing this policy, now the role of those who are subject to the policy is to follow its directives, without interference. Further, and completing the vicious cycle, the perpetration of the idea of policy as a closed system creates its own authority, where interference or mismanagement are presented as capable of unraveling the policy; and thus, engaged actors (seen as a form of disturbance) can be presented as likely culprits for policy failure. In this problematic model, policy is to be administered, with groups identified and variables (particularly human variables) controlled, as in an experimental research design.

Traditional, or what we are calling here closed policy design and understanding is then the ideological stance that conceives and values policy as designed to “act as its own cause.” Wildavsky, on the other hand, was the first to suggest that we should value policy (as a concept) and policies (as distinct enactments of that concept) in more open terms. As the founding Dean of University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Public Policy, his work is informed by educative parameters. The school of thought he established at Berkeley proposes that a critic or analyst should “value policies by the extent to which they (1) permit learning, or (2) the ease by which errors are identified, as well as (3) the motivation produced by organizational incentives to correct error” (1979, 392). The impact of policy is thus not simply the solution of identified problems (as problems are always present and always changing), but programs of actions that foster iterative and contextual efforts, which amplify original aims and link problem-solving to local initiative. Policy thus is no longer just a thing (the text, directive, legislation, and implementation design) but a process (the potentially creative problem solving that policy triggers). This opens up the possibility of other considerations, for instance, the notion of policy networks (see Sörensen and Torfing 2007) where interdependence is considered; those Etzioni (1968/1992) explores, studying how policy participation, as well as manipulation, involves psychological states or emotions; or the democratic models for policy practice as articulated by Schneider and Ingram (1997). As a space for research in the field of music teacher education the role of networks in “linking actors from different countries, levels and spheres in transnational, multi-level and multi-cultural networks” (Sörensen and Torfing 2007, 311) clearly aligns with intercultural interests, has great potential, and yet has been widely neglected.

Following Sabatier (2007) our position is that a valuable policy is one which affords the space for multiple communities to enter, to join in, and, in that process, to learn. From learning and from incentives (which can be economic or external, but also contextual or intrinsic), adaptation and new action ensues. The notion of networks of interaction are then crucial here and particularly significant to our argument in this chapter, as teacher input – qualified, thoughtful, and as a regular and systematic occurrence – is essential to a fully functioning educational environment.

4 Policy Participation and Framing Skills

It is not harsh to say, then, that views of and dispositions toward policy that continue to disregard Wildavsky’s notions, operate, knowingly or not, within assumptions that aid in the colonization of the policy subject. Paternalistically and patronizingly, much of the educational apparatus in a growing number of places have kept and continue to keep teachers from exerting their policy responsibilities and rights. Unfortunately, teacher education has not been a sufficiently positive contributor either.

The challenge is not simply with teachers. Given the nature of labor within schools today, leadership remains a central problem. Winton and Pollock (2012), for example, highlight that critical leadership and policy learning are largely absent from the education of principals. Indeed, curricular analyses of principalship programs in North America show wide emphasis on managerial development; in line with a shift in the role of the principal in the last 15 years from curricular leader and vision-setter to structural manager. If one looks at the over-representation of outside unidirectional policies (the impositions of NCLB, for example), the narrowing of how leadership is conceptualized in schools, the intensification of teachers’ labor, and professional formation that gives strong preference to content expertise and behavioral management, the strengthening of schools as highly hierarchical spaces should come as a surprise to no one. Regardless of the effect of political or policy savvy (Laes and Schmidt 2016), research shows that educators acquire leadership and political skills on the job, often through mistakes. Teacher education by-and-large does not consider policy-directed core practices. This shows how few studies explore the ways that school leaders gain political skills, pointing out that the literature is even more scant when it comes to the formation of teachers’ political (policy) skills. It seems critical then that a participative vision for/of policy be rekindled.

Given all of the above, we stand with Schmidt: “policy cannot be farmed out to others nor relegated as outside the purview of teachers. Given that the policy enterprise is a process requiring constant adjustment, only our [teachers] active participation can engender intelligent and integrative decision making” (Schmidt 2017, 17). Schmidt’s views on policy are in line with a 2013 report by the Center for American Progress, in which Elizabeth Evans, founder of VIVA Teachers (Voice, Ideas, Vision, Action), writes:

We have seen over and over again this kind of light-bulb moment that management and union leadership alike have when they listen to ordinary classroom teachers talking about policy and they actually hear substance that’s both reinforcing and adding nuance and depth to what they’ve already been thinking. (2013, 14)

Without a critical education in policy thinking, teacher education and professional development structures prevent what the literature calls policy learning; that is, the capacity to learn from contextual experiences and understand how to navigate and influence spaces. The capacity to learn policy then seems to be a core practice that teacher education ought to develop. This overriding core practice could provide the framework for other, more specific and directed critical capacities which work to “keep learning to teach complex” (Lampert et al. 2013). Complex teacher training would address, for example, intercultural action within musicianship or pedagogical and curricular parameters.

Now that we have outlined a macro reconfiguration of the impact that policy thinking can have on teacher practice, the next sections emphasize the development of other significant and specific core practices within teacher education. We now return, in more depth, to the literature of “core practices” as originating from teacher education in the US. We describe it within current debates about teacher accountability, the rationale of core practices as a pedagogy, and its limitations. Finally, we provide some core practices of intercultural teaching in regards to policy.

5 Rationale for Practice-Based Teacher Education

The recent shifts in teacher accountability and policy towards managerial aspects where teachers are the targets of policy rather than their locus (outlined above) have affected how some teacher educators conceive the pedagogies they employ to educate teachers. In response to these closed systems of policy, for better or worse, some teacher educators have shifted toward “practice-based” development of so-called “core practices.” Advocates of core practices suggest that core practices are a response to teacher education over the last 30 years, which has focused on development of dispositions of teachers. Ball and Forzani argue that “the focus in teacher education can slip easily into an exclusively cognitive domain, emphasizing beliefs and ideas over the actual skills and judgment required in enactment” (2009, 503). Grossman and McDonald elaborate:

Much of the research on teaching in the past two decades has focused on teachers’ knowledge – of specific subject matter, of learners and learning, of ways to teach specific content – and teachers’ beliefs. And while we would be the first to agree that these are critically important aspects of teaching, teaching, at its core, is an interactive, clinical practice, one that requires not just knowledge but craft and skill. (2008, 189)

Core practice advocates suggest that teacher education has focused on dispositions, or the necessary habits of mind in order to teach, as well as content knowledge and knowledge of pedagogy. While these are of importance, focus on these areas has failed to help preservice teachers apply and rehearse those dispositions and knowledge.

In embedding these dispositions and knowledge and practices in craft and skill, advocates further argue that educators need to delineate the essential or core practices of teaching. These core practices are “high-leverage practices” (Grossman et al. 2009), which are applicable to various educational settings. In conceiving these broadly applicable, high-leverage practices, advocates argue that these practices are “kept complex” (Lampert et al. 2013). In other words, in developing core practices, there can be a tendency to atomize the process, turning practices into series of competencies or unreflective behaviors, for example, waiting 5 s after asking a question for students to respond. In contrast, advocates suggest core practices that teachers will understand and be able to execute in all the different ways that the core practices might be enacted in different contexts.

6 The Potentials and Limitations of Core Practices

This critique of teacher education and shift in conception towards core practices of teaching is potentially fruitful. It has the capacity to embed learning the craft of teaching within action. This aspect has much in common with constructivist aspects of teaching because learning to teach is embedded within action. However, in relation to intercultural teaching, the concept of core practices has some limitations, and the idea of developing intercultural teaching may provide further critique of a core-practices approach to teacher education. By addressing these critiques, core practices may become a way to engage teachers thoroughly and systematically in intercultural teaching.

To begin a critique, core practices must be historicized within the current trends in the US that we outlined earlier. Teacher “accountability” in the US – and increasingly in other countries – has worked to de-professionalize teacher education. “Accountability” advocates have instituted teacher evaluation systems that make causational links between teaching and effects on students but ignore the variability within different teaching contexts. They have also called for limiting teaching education to mere training through alternative routes to teacher licensure. Core practices in teacher education are potentially a capitulation to these moves to de-professionalize teacher education in the name of “accountability.” Core practices might exacerbate these aims, which consider teachers as targets of policy in a closed system – as mere workers who enact policy in a direct, de-professionalized way, rather than the generators and adapters of policy who constitute the professionalism of teaching. De-professionalization is befitting of, and embedded within, the move towards more managerial conceptions of administration in schools. Core practices, conceived as a set of non-negotiable essential practices, would serve these aims.

This aim to de-professionalize the profession is also potentially anti-democratic. As critics have noted, recent policies by organizations like NCTQ (2013) that promote free choice and accountability and a critique of traditional teacher education programs housed in universities are aimed to dismantle public education, with particularly negative consequences for urban schools, communities lacking resources, and students of color (Ravitch 2013). As teacher educators adopt these core practices, the potential arises to shift emphasis away from issues of diversity and equity. As Zeichner notes,

[An] element that is not typically included in discussions of preparing teachers to enact high-leverage teaching practices is the development of teachers’ cultural competence and ability to teach in culturally responsive ways…. Not discussing this aspect of teaching in culturally diverse settings implies that the successful implementation of core teaching practices alone will result in better learning outcomes for students who are now underserved by the public schools. The evidence does not support this assumption. (2012, 380)

The emphasis of core practices that work in all educational contexts has the potential to wash away differences in pedagogy required for different cultural contexts. This is at the detriment of students of color. Issues of power are necessarily embedded with any notion of core. As Dutro and Cartun note, “[c]ore always already signifies an outside that surrounds it. Core and surround – one term cannot hold meaning without the other. Thus, as a metaphor, it cannot but construct boundaries of what is in and what is out, what is in the center and what is not” (2016, 120). As a result, they suggest that whom we teach, and who we are, give rise to what is considered “core.” Who “we” are is structured around “bodies,” or the race, of teachers and students. As a result, Dutro and Cartun explain:

bodies pose questions. Those questions embedded in bodies and their very different locations, we argue, must be explicitly part of the field’s conversations about aspects of teaching identified as central and how to take them up with novice teachers. In other words, language positioning some teaching practices at the center can be an invitation to consider how language works to create binaries and prompt processes that complicate what is explicitly or implicitly named as what counts most in moments of teaching. (2016, 120)

These critiques urge educators aiming to employ core practices to consider weighing them carefully with concerns about intercultural teaching that might become absent in their application. Core practices, as measured and determined by practice as it currently stands, potentially support any racist (and classist, sexist, able-bodied, etc.) educational systems that marginalize people of color and could construct them as bodies that do not respond to the effective strategies that core practices purport to articulate.

These critiques suggest that for core practices to remain creative they must question the concept of “core,” looking to how core evolves and is enacted in different teaching contexts. This is particularly important around the concept of “intercultural,” including race, nationality, and other traditionally marginalized identities. Core practices – rather than relying on a conception of core as ‘what just works’ – requires a theoretical foundation. In other words, to use a term borrowed from Marx, core practices might lack a robust interaction with theory in ‘praxis.’ As Marx and Engels note, “[d]ivision of labor becomes truly such only from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears…. From this moment onward, consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real” (1970, 51–52). The ‘thinking’ of policy and the ‘labor’ of teaching must be melded in the activity of praxis, in the sense Marx intended it. In this way, we might be calling for ‘core praxis’ with particular emphasis on thinking of practice in relation to theory, policy, and institutional and systemic structures. In this sense, the melding of policy as ‘abstract’ (or removed rules that govern and guide practice) with the actual practice of teaching, a mutually beneficial union, informs the professional practice of teachers.

7 Core Practices of Intercultural Music Teaching

We have highlighted the potential and the limits of core practices in reference to intercultural music teaching. Within the tension between the potential and limits, we ask, what might be some core practices of intercultural music teaching? In asking this question, it is important to find a balance between some of the areas we have covered by embedding all inquiry in practice. Policy, or the macro, might not be learned in discussion, but embedded within practice, or the micro. In learning about and through practice, there is the question of “grain size;” teacher educators might “keep practice complex” by not overly prescribing practice, and creating lists of competencies and discrete behaviors. However, in the quest of “keeping it complex,” teacher educators must not easily slip into a “cognitive domain” where dispositions are secured without embedding the enactment of those dispositions in practice. Finally, they must also balance the micro of local concerns and the macro of global and universal ideals. They must balance generalities of “good teaching” regardless of context, with the adaptability and specificity of teaching in various contexts. This balancing of policy, theory and practice to find the key or essential aspects of teaching might be a form of what we are calling “core praxis.” In particular, attention to issues of diversity, equity, and even alterity must become central to this task, which is not easy. However, we provide a starting point for how teacher educators might enact core policies and practices in intercultural teaching.

The following constitutes a potential initial list of “core practices” in intercultural teaching in music education. These become a starting point to begin thinking about the practices that music teacher educators might focus on as they help preservice teachers prepare for teaching in the continually evolving, contemporary intercultural landscape. Key to these core practices of intercultural teaching is, to reiterate Schmidt’s words, the ability to “learn policy tactics such as employing strategies for persuading others, circulating information, provoking and guiding discussions, asking critical questions, preaching, using language carefully, and employing government language” (2017, 18). Music educators might implement these strategies towards the core practices listed below. While this is an incomplete, precursory list of only three practices, no list of core practices could ever totally encompass the diversity of teaching; core practices are complex, intercultural practices, melding theory with practice.

7.1 Core Practice 1: Represent Diversity in Music and Curricula

It has been noted many times that music is a universal cultural practice. For example, Blacking (1974) notes that every culture has some form of music making. These musics are conceived as “art,” cultural artifacts, objects, a social process, or in other forms. Music educators have called for an engagement with and learning about these diverse cultural practices; and an “intercultural” approach, as articulated in this book, necessarily calls for a “multicultural” engagement that engages, teaches, and facilitates a variety of musical cultural practices. This is an area that has traditionally received attention within music education through areas including praxial education, popular music and informal practices, and multiculturalism.

However, a less discussed topic within music education regards an understanding of how discourses define the “multi” in multiculturalism. Concomitant with this engagement with different cultures is the concept of “alterity” or otherness. As teachers engage in “other” cultures, they might become cognizant of how this concept of otherness is constructed and represented by discourses on race, gender, nationality, and other forms of identity. As Baumann (2006) suggests, the lines between identity and otherness are continually drawn and redrawn. This suggests that otherness is not based on inherent differences between different groups of people, but are, instead, socially constructed. For example, the lines of “Western civilization” is constructed around a host of discourses on, for example, race, and religion. Drawing these lines ignores similarities along other lines. As music educators engage in intercultural teaching, they might work to interrogate the discourses that create otherness. Teacher educators might embed this in practice by requiring teachers to create and teach within the musics of a variety of cultures, understanding how they are similar and different, and most importantly, under what assumptions and discourses those similarities might be created.

In light of “intercultural” (in the sense that “inter” describes the mixing of these different cultures), music teacher educators might think about multiculturalism not as comprised of discrete practices where music educators adhere to “authentic” practices, but look at cultural and musical intersections and the changing nature of musical practices. Musical instruments might be an example of this complexity: Teacher might learn to play instruments associated with particular practices, but also how one adapts musical instruments to work within and contribute to those practices. Importantly, then, how teachers might inform policies towards issues of multiculturalism is key to this practice including issues of representation in curricula on the local, regional, and even national levels.

7.2 Core Practice 2: Reflect on Practice in Reference to Diversity and Equity

As schools become increasingly diverse throughout the world, as with growing populations in the US and immigration in Europe, among other places, teachers are required to attend to issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. They may begin to understand how particular well-established practices in music education might create access barriers in music education. For example, curricula focusing on the music of particular demographics might discourage students of color. Focus on Western classical music, and recent engagement of popular music construed as American and Anglo rock might not encourage students of color to participate. Practices where students must pay for their own materials might discourage participation of students with economic needs.

Part of understanding schools’ practices in reference to diversity is understanding how students interact with one another. Recent changes in politics and governance in the USA and parts of Europe have shifted towards populist sentiments and have given rise to racist and xenophobic actions by certain parts of these populations. Students and schools are not immune to these shifts. Managing these interactions with the aims of diversity and inclusion could be a practice that music teachers might develop. In understanding how students interact with one another, music teachers might become aware of microaggressions, which Sue defines as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership” (2010, 3). Understanding how students may enact microagressions through social interactions, and particularly the ways they are enacted through music, is a potential focus. Teacher educators might gear this for practice by engaging students in teaching and framing issues through curriculum and policy.

7.3 Core Practice 3: Invite Students to Engage in Praxis

If the practice aspect of core practices is to be taken seriously, then practice might be extended to work with the preservice teachers’ students. As preservice teachers begin to think about issues of diversity and inclusion and how to apply relevant, supportive practices, they might also turn their attention towards engaging their students in those same aims. Preservice educators might begin to help their students understand how social, political, and economic forces influence individuals. They might focus on how music becomes a representation, product, and tool of these systems of inequality, including helping students to develop a critical vocabulary and to understand the ethical, political, and musical aspects and results of institutional inequality. Addressing inequality might also include identifying microagressions in music. How is a dominant group’s (mis)appropriation of music, dance, and other cultural forms from marginalized populations a part of students’ creation and consumption of music? What are the economic inequalities that influence and shape musical practices? How will we engage with our community in light of what we learn from answering these questions? These are some questions teachers can ask of students to engaging them in approaching issues of inequality.

However, because core practices are embedded within practice it is important to focus these questions and actions in the process of teaching. These are difficult topics to address with students. They and their families may have strong opinions on these topics. The delicateness of addressing such sensitive issues may be particularly difficult for early career teachers who do not have the experience, community trust, or the job security that more veteran teachers might enjoy. Therefore, it is important for teacher educators to introduce preservice teachers to strategies that engage students in social practice. A commitment to core practices would also require teacher educators to give preservice teachers the opportunity to practice these strategies in scaffolded, “safe” contexts. Drawing upon literature in multicultural education (Banks 2014), social justice-oriented teaching and action (Picower 2012), and dialogic education (Freire 2000) may serve as theoretical frames to generate and practice social praxis with students.

8 Conclusion

Within these core practices of intercultural teaching, music teacher educators might begin to help preservice teachers navigate the terrain and tension of intercultural teaching, practice, and policy. With this aim, teacher educators might keep it complex. This complexity requires that they embed learning to teach in practice, while melding it with theory to create praxis. They might aim to make teachers the creators rather than simply the targets of policy, merging the ‘macro’ of policy with the local or ‘micro’ of teaching (Schmidt and Colwell 2017). In cultivating these core practices, there is the seemingly contrary practice of questioning and de-centering these core practices. The concept of ‘core’ has the potential to ossify practice, ignore difference, and, as a result, potentially become ‘anti-intercultural’ or at least ‘un-intercultural.’

As we see it then, these could be initial steps to create core practice of intercultural teaching in music, while also considering the need to examine core practices in terms of curriculum and policy. In curricular or pedagogical terms, core practices, such as those we articulated, might include teachers paying attention to representation of diversity in music and curricula, reflecting on their practice in reference to diversity and equity, and inviting their students also to engage in intercultural praxis. In policy terms, looking at our teacher education and teachers’ core practices might mean to further focus on the fact that policy enterprise is a process requiring constant adjustment, and thus only our active participation can engender intelligent and integrative decision making. A core practice here then might be a modicum of focus on the development of policy savvy where music educators come to own policy as an alternative conceptualization of influence, and in the process, learn how to use to their advantage curricular, organizational, and political discursive practices, facilitating spaces for coalition work, framing and strategically organizing change, and developing the capacity to read their political environs. We believe a combined approach can prove capacious and create an avenue for powerful, positive change in the teaching profession.