The role of ideology in band teacher agency

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of ideology in band teachers’ agency. We intentionally recruited participants who were critically reflective about the purpose of competition in their band programs. Research questions included: (a) What unconscious, self-evident meanings manifest in band teachers’ agency? and (b) How do aspects of band teachers’ ecological environments animate their agency? We used two theoretical approaches in this study: Fisher’s capitalist realism and Priestley et al.’s ecological framework of teacher agency. We found that music performance was the primary self-evident value that saturated participants’ agency, and it included participants’ unquestioned belief in the benefits of students’ perpetual growth as musical performers. Participants exhibited a type of performance realism in that they could imagine no alternative goals. We suggest that the pervasiveness of capitalist realism in education discourse in the United States makes change through individual teachers’ agency challenging, and the profession’s reliance on individuals’ morally based actions toward change may have stymied widespread reform. Change through teacher agency requires individuals to resist powerful, discursive ideology, structures, traditions, and social pressures, and we recommend that scholars and music teacher educators join in-service teachers as a collective to alleviate some of the harms of capitalism associated with the ideology of competition and performance in music education.