Beyond participation: A reflexive narrative of the inclusive potentials of activist scholarship in music education
Tuulikki Laes
Abstract
In this self-reflexive study, I examine the possibilities and limitations of inclusive methodologies within activist scholarship in music education.
Stemming from my own experiences and struggles as an activist researcher, I reconsider the potentials of inclusivity within participatory research approaches, especially concerning, or done together with, persons labelled as having learning disabilities. Acknowledging that the vocabulary and ethical guidelines for inclusive knowledge production in (music) educational research methodologies is in its infancy, this study addresses the demand for new spaces of academic activism through negotiations with the research community, including research participants and funders, and reconsiderations of the research roles and processes as contingent and relational.
Keywords
activist scholarship, disability, inclusive research, reflexivity
I always have to clean up I always have to do the dishes
I always have to go to work I always have to see the doctor
I can’t use the computer I can’t watch TV I can’t even see my friends I always have to be at home I always have to take care of stuff
I always have to eat properly I always have to drink properly
I can’t eat sweets or drink soda I can’t even drink alcohol
I always have to rest I always have to sleep I always have to get up I always have to take a shower1
We live in a scripted reality. In such a climate where the narratives of the pow-erful, the privileged, and the able define the center of society, certain individuals, groups or traits are normalized, and others are cast as inferior. These intransigent lines of oppression are perpetuated by attempts to assist those who struggle by attending to them as a specific “area of need” (Patel, 2016, p. 23). In educational research and practices, even the label special needs, so often applied to students who differ from the centered norm, locates the problem within the different individual.
In doing this, we reinforce the ableist scripts that narrate the majority as normal, and the special as other. The lyrics that open this article are written by the lead singer of a Finnish punk rock band Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät, inspired by the artists’ frustration of having to live in an assisted group home. This short verse illustrates how daily life for those defined within this specific area of need is often predetermined, indeed, life has been scripted for them. With people with disabil-ities seen as in need of care, professionals such as care workers, therapists, teachers and researchers are often considered to know best, to know what is needed, and to know what might empower the marginalized. However, as the above lyrics lament, the members of the band are challenging the pervasive power hierarchies inherent
1 Song title: Aina mun pitää (I always have to); Original lyrics: Kari Aalto; English translation: unknown; Performed by: Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät (http://www.pkn.rocks)
in such approaches to empowerment through their own music, raising questions about how to resist and change the oppressive, scripted everyday realities (see Jun-tunen, Karlsen, Kuoppamäki, Laes & Muhonen, 2014, for a more detailed account of the band).
Limited conceptions and discourses of disability may also be seen in music education. For example, students categorized as having learning difficulties are typically relegated to the fields of music therapy or special education, overlooking the fact that disability is by no means the only identity available for them (Gar-land-Thomson & Bailey, 2010). While individualized pedagogical solutions are undoubtedly useful in engaging students in musical activity, through assigning special categories for human variation as exceptions to the norm, scholarly work in music education maintains the dominance of a medicalized discourse on disability and difference (Dobbs, 2012). In correcting this power imbalance and dismantling and reconstructing the power of the prevailing disability metaphor, it becomes crucial to “[insist] on the personal story” (Shuman, 2015, p. 47) of the very people who have experienced disabilities themselves.It is generally agreed upon in qual-itative research that the exploration of personal, lived experience is essential for ethical human research practices (Schwandt, 1994; Clandinin, 2006). Also music education researchers have increasingly attended to narrative as a method and a research stance, seeking ways to uncover and amplify multiple voices and mean-ing-makings that would otherwise remain silent, or silenced (Stauffer & Barrett, 2009).
However, while the personal story such as the one presented through the punk band’s lyrics is crucial for understanding the perspectives other than your own, we also need to attend to our own roles as researchers in order to identify and decon-struct the power hierarchies within research. In this article, I present a self-reflex-ive narratself-reflex-ive of an ongoing process of constructing activist scholarship, through problematizing the discursive and methodological constraints that construct the binary between academia and activism (Maxey, 1999). Stemming from shared, intersubjective experiences in my research with musicians with disabilities, this article focuses particularly on my own considerations of reflexivity as a catalyst for research. As suggested by Finlay (2002), reflexivity is a necessary and generative tool for negotiating and making use of researcher’s self-analysis and self-disclo-sure to reshape research practices and discourses. In narrative inquiry, Clandinin and Connelly (2000) also remind us that lived experience is to be understood as continuous, demanding researchers to move back and forth “between the personal and the social, simultaneously thinking about the past, present, and future” (pp.
2-3). Thus, through drawing on my own experience, my methodological approach is here a dialogical reflexivity between “inner speech” and written narrative form (Motta, Rafalski, Rangel & de Souza, 2013), that helps me to “reflexively turn back” (Nichols, 2016) to the past events in order to understand and anticipate what is required in activist music education scholarship in the future.
Setting the stage
My activist music education research that is the focus of this article takes place in the context of Resonaari music school. This extra-curricular school is an excep-tional case in Finland, offering goal-oriented music education for children and adults with learning characteristics that traditional music schools and conven-tional pedagogies fail to respond to. Resonaari enacts inclusive, activist music ed-ucation through unique policy and pedagogy solutions: promoting their students’
musical agency beyond therapeutic care, creating for them possibilities to engage in public performances and make connections beyond institutional contexts, thus paving their way for professional musicianship (Laes & Schmidt, 2016). Activism, in the music education work done at Resonaari may be seen through the pro-duction of culture, policy, and pedagogical practices through active engagements with social groups that have generally been relegated to remedial and therapeutic spheres of music education.
My research in this context has focused on wider impacts of agency construc-tion among the students and musicians at Resonaari. Considering these individuals as active political agents, musical experts, and credible and important knowledge producers in various music education contexts, Resonaari’s contribution extends beyond music learning practices, to policy advocacy and political activism, collab-oration with stakeholders, and development work in higher educational contexts (Laes & Schmidt, 2016; Laes & Westerlund, forthcoming). Addressing these wid-er inclusive research aims lead me to conclude that the key pwid-ersons of Resonaari could no longer be called mere participants in my research. Their roles were not simply student, apprentice, or informant, but rather teacher, expert, and colleague – and in the future, even co-researcher. This notion brought with it a need to clear-ly articulate and reflect upon how to make the research processes more accountable and responsible, or as Patel (2016) suggests, answerable, to the inclusive aims of activist music education.