Music as a place of belonging: an autoethnographic study of creative learning in diverse school contexts

This article examines how creative music-making became a site of participation and belonging in my work as an international music educator across school contexts in Asia between 2014 and 2024. The learner group comprised children and adolescents in international schools; here, ‘international school’ is an institutional descriptor, not a claim of a uniform expatriate or socioeconomic profile. I use retrospective analytic autoethnography to revisit practitioner journals, lesson annotations, classroom observation notes and reflective memos. Four composite vignettes preserve recurring interactional sequences while protecting the identities of learners and school communities. The analysis suggests that belonging became visible when learners could contribute before speaking at length, when peers took up one another’s musical ideas, and when students gained authority over repertoire, form and ensemble decisions. The accounts also complicate celebratory claims about music: teacher correction, unstructured freedom and unequal control could narrow participation. Across the decade, my pedagogy moved from correction-first instruction towards relational sequencing of invitation, exploration, reflection and refinement. This chronological association cannot establish causation, but it provides a situated account of how teacher stance and task design may shape musical agency. The article offers analytically transferable propositions rather than generalisable claims about student wellbeing.