Singing to Empower: Pedagogical Frameworks and Strategies for Restructuring Power Dynamics in Choral Ensembles

Abstract

Singing to Empower combines Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, Anti-Oppressive Practice, and Critical Pedagogy to develop an instructional design for restructuring power dynamics in the Western education choral ensemble. Drawing on these frameworks from education and social work scholarship, this research develops a different model of choral leadership to replace the existing state-of-the-art practices that promote obedience and subservience among choristers. Existing scholarship on critical pedagogy in music primarily focuses on understanding the educational theory behind the methodology. This work connects the methodology with existing praxis-based scholarship to model critical pedagogy in practice.Singing to Empower defines and examines the power structure present in the educational choral ensemble. It builds on Frank Abrahams’ existing scholarship on conceptualizing Paulo Freire’s pioneering work in critical pedagogy for addressing inequity in music education. It addresses criticisms of anti-oppressive work by developing systems to establish psychological safety and build measurable, transferable musical skills. Each pedagogical strategy used to model tenets of critical pedagogy in practice is measured by its efficacy in developing more autonomous, agentive, and empowered choral artists. The result of this work was a new instructional design for performance-based learning that enables Western-trained conductors to integrate it into their choral ensembles.