In elementary music classrooms, expectations for audience participation often stem from Eurocentric musical traditions and Whiteness. These expectations can become so normalized in music education that their cultural and racial histories are overlooked. As such, the purpose of this article is to explore the roots of Whiteness surrounding audience participation in elementary music education and to consider how teachers might educate students about different expectations across musical and cultural settings. I propose a framework for teaching audience participation: Balance, Contextualize, and Practice & Compare. Through this framework, elementary music teachers might provide students with opportunities to understand and experience audience participation across musical and cultural contexts while reconsidering which musical traditions hold curricular value. Ultimately, elementary music teachers and their students must be willing to question the assumptions they bring to musical experiences, including those they have long accepted without question.
Digital games are increasingly present in young people’s musical lives, yet their use in music classrooms can easily become individualized through scores, rankings, badges, and separate devices. In this column, I examine how digital game-based learning can support community-building in music education when teachers move beyond competition as the primary design principle. Drawing on research on digital game-based learning and music games, I offer examples and strategies, including composing for video-game scenes, structured improvisation games, multiplayer music participation, and students’ existing engagement with virtual music worlds. The goal is not to gamify every lesson, but to use play and game design to build musical community through shared participation, culturally responsive practice, and creative meaning-making.
This farewell column encourages other practitioner teachers to write for the Journal. Practitioner teachers have a valuable voice and perspective, and this column outlines a method for gathering ideas, reading other journal articles, outlining, and finally writing and submitting a finished work.
