Secondary Choral Music Educators’ Usage of African American Spirituals in American Music Classrooms

Abstract The purpose of this exploratory pilot study was to develop a descriptive analysis of American secondary choral music educators’ inclusion and current teaching practices concerning African American spirituals. African American spirituals have served a variety of sociological functions throughout American history, from work songs to cryptic songs of freedom to anthems for civil rights and social justice. Given the unique combination of West African and Eurocentric musical characteristics found in the genre, spirituals require different pedagogical considerations than music of the Western classical art tradition, which has most closely been associated with formal American ensemble music learning. This structural prevalence, or habitus, toward Western classical conventions within the profession may call into question the ways in which the West African elements of spirituals are observed and taught. Utilizing Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory as a guiding lens, a questionnaire was disseminated to American middle and high school choral directors to compare their priorities concerning literature selection, performance considerations, pedagogical tools, and sources of pedagogical knowledge for teaching African American spirituals. Despite the localized nature of participant responses, results suggested that even though this sampling of secondary choral directors was comfortable with teaching African American spirituals to students, some teaching practices could be culturally invalid to the genre and signal a potential Westernization of spirituals that places greater cultural capital on the Eurocentric elements. Further investigation is recommended on the relationships between director pedagogical content knowledge and the manner(s) in which African American spirituals are taught and performed in choral programs.