Teaching Mao through Music: Pedagogy and Practice in the Liberal Arts Classroom

Abstract

In designing the undergraduate music topics course, “Music & Mao: Music & Politics in Communist China,†I was challenged to convey the context of 1960s Communist China to my classroom of 9 white American students in 2009 at a predominately white institution. Five years later my classroom changed to a diverse mix of racial identities and nationalities including white Americans, American students of color, and international students from China.  As a multiracial Asian American woman I always consider my own identity when I stand in front of the classroom. As an ethnomusicologist, I intentionally shift the classroom away from white and US-centric approaches of teaching China as the “other.†And through social justice based teaching I empower each of my students to engage with the course material in ways that are meaningful to their own social identities.

In this article I identify pedagogies in the undergraduate music classroom that may be applied across genres, topics, and disciplines. In particular, I focus on two aspects: 1) how assignments that explicitly connect course content and learning process provide new levels of engagement with course concepts, and 2) how a diverse and inclusive classroom of students can positively impact student learning and help foster an inclusive classroom and cross-racial learning.