Troubling Transcultural Practices: Anti-Colonial Thinking for Music Education

Transcultural pedagogy, or what is often described as world music pedagogy, in U.S. and Canadian classrooms often utilizes an extractive logic, serving to essentialize culture, invisibilize logics that are incongruent to European, Canadian, and U.S.-centric epistemologies, and uphold the goal of white assimilation under the guise of multiculturalism.As former K-12 music educators, now in higher education, we worry about the potential for music teachers to engage in "world music" in the classroom via a touristic model.In this paper, we trouble practices we identify as transcultural in music education, drawing on anti-colonialism as a theoretical framework to trouble the colonial dynamics in these music education practices.We ultimately aim to construct an ethical approach to world music pedagogy through the use of narrative and counterfactual history.