(Re)Birth of the Cool: A Culturally Sustaining & Community Responsive Pedagogical Framework for Music Education

This qualitative research study sought to illuminate how culturally sustaining, community responsive educational frameworks of pedagogy and leadership (Duncan-Andrade, 2022) can serve to increase recruitment, enrollment, retention, graduation, and overall satisfaction rates for ethnically minoritized student populations majoring or seeking degrees in fields of music in institutions of higher education. To investigate this question, a collective portraiture case study (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Stake, 1995) that compared music departments of two different universities located in a localized state, was conducted to analyze both the need for and effectiveness of such a framework. The data were collected by way of this particular qualitative portraiture research methodology through the nuanced methodologies of counternarrative interview—a critical race theory approach to narrative research (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b), artifact collection, and observation of professors and students (undergraduate through post-graduate) in music departments at each university. The data were then coded, analyzed, and organized bit-by-bit to weave together an “aesthetic whole” portrait (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), illuminating whether the presence or absence of community responsive, culturally sustaining pedagogical practices/ leadership impacted student retention and genuine feelings of inclusion, for historically and demographically minoritized students and faculty across academic levels. Data analyses of the portrait revealed levels to which culturally sustaining, community responsive frameworks of leadership and pedagogy are critical components for music programs toward increasing recruitment, enrollment, retention, graduation, and overall satisfaction of such populations, all of whom earnestly aspired to feel a tangible sense of belonging in the face of the problematic exclusionary paradigms and white supremacy culture maintained in the schooling that has been, and continues to be, standardized in the school of music in North America and across the globe (Kindall-Smith et al., 2011).