RHD_ASAP2021 - Approaches to African Sonic Pedagogies

Addressing transformation, integration and the decolonisation of the curriculum on several levels, the universities involved whilst locating each epistemological approach. In addition, as traditional modes of learning African musical arts rarely encompass evaluation, assessment as emphasised in current tertiary education models, this study will evaluate the efficacy of each university’s strategy. The pedagogy envisaged should implicate assessment strategies as learning, of learning and for learning. in this study group have developed courses to re-value and promote African ways of making and interacting with music. Approaching decoloniality as contextual, relational, practice based, and lived, each institution has actively engaged in establishing practical indigenous African music making courses that students have access to whilst completing an undergraduate degree (Walsh 2018, 19). The courses are based on an interactive ‘call and response’ methodology which highlights the individual, communal and collective learning of a diverse group of change drivers in what can be a very polarised African society (Kulundu 2018). Each contribution is designed to generate future teachers, culture-bearers and music fans/connoisseurs who will possess a deeper understanding of, and feeling for, indigenous African musics and who, as a result, will be able to engage with African musics through teaching, learning and appreciation at all levels. This type of intervention, referred to as transmission and acquisition in Ethnomusicology, is being practised at universities globally (Kruger 2009; Schippers 2010; Campbell & Higgins 2015), where ethnomusicologists and community musicians teach students about music from around the world. However, in our collective situation, African musical material is being taught to predominantly African students who, for many different reasons, have previously been denied the opportunity to fully engage with music from their own cultures. Students are not learning about music from another country or continent, but rather from their own continent and even their own cultures. Thus, this research is of a critical nature, with the intention being to create knowledge for policy and curriculum change at tertiary level and to highlight the importance of indigenous knowledge as a pathway for identity formation and knowledge production and dissemination. It will encourage a form of transcultural education which will develop avenues for the students to interact with unfamiliar music traditions which will consequently lead to self-examination and an autonomous reconceptualisation of their own relationships, assumptions and preferences (Elliot, 2005, 9–11). This research promotes the musical arts and cultural heritage on the African continent as deeply intertwined and connected, with transgenerational knowledge sharing at its core. It entails inquiry into the teleology of African music pedagogy, looking to establish an understanding of the goals of the institutions