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I still remember a music teacher I coached who was seeking to make their curriculum more culturally responsive for her students.
She knew that many of her students were Spanish speaking, so she sought out folk songs in Spanish to teach them that would also satisfy the specific concepts and skills they needed to learn for their development level.
While her efforts were well-intentioned, there were several missteps: in her gathering of songs in Spanish, she missed finding out specifically what countries and cultures her students represented. As a result, she had come across many Mexican songs in Spanish, but her students primarily were from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
She also didn’t look closely enough at the background or subject matter of the Spanish songs she found, so when she was teaching the songs she was focused only on the students learning the words, rhythms, and melodic content, but not on the people from which the songs came, culture, style, current events, and other culturally relevant connections to see the whole picture of the songs.
Even the most caring and well-intentioned music educator can unintentionally perpetuate harmful views, approaches, and methodologies for teaching music when they don’t critically examine their curriculum & instructional choices.
This is where conducting a thorough music curriculum audit through a lens of cultural responsiveness, diversity, equity, and inclusion becomes an important process to ensure that your music curriculum is well-positioned to be culturally responsive & relevant, as well as support pedagogy that allows equitable access to rigorous learning for all learners.
What is a music curriculum audit?
A music curriculum audit is a review of a music curriculum in order to identify how well it is aligned with stated mission & goals. This can be conducted on your school, district, or organization’s music curriculum, or on a pre-packaged curriculum that you are considering adopting. Conducting an audit of your music curriculum allows you to see what is going well and is already well aligned with your goals, where there are opportunities for improvement, and what steps you may want to take.
The key components of a music curriculum audit include:
- Assemble the curriculum audit team
- Establish the focus, goals, and data points
- Review curriculum materials to gather data on each goal
- Survey students and parents/community
- Compile findings, reflect on data, and identify key actions for improvement
- Make a plan for action steps
Let’s take a closer look at each component and how to center cultural responsiveness and equity in the process.
Music curriculum audits through a culturally responsive and DEI lens
Assemble your curriculum audit team
Applying a culturally responsive and DEI lens to the curriculum audit team means that a variety of voices need to be at the table. Including all the music educators at your school, district, and organization would be preferred, but if that would be too many folks to manage (I’m looking at school districts that have hundreds of music educators!), or if scheduling is a challenge, select a core team that reflects a variety of identities and experiences.
While the core team will do all of the heavy lifting of the curriculum audit, other members of the music team can still be surveyed so that their voices are included as well. This ensures that as many of the people who are closest to the delivery of the curriculum as possible have a say.
If you’re the only music educator at your school, district, or organization, reach out to other solo music educators in your professional network from other schools to do this together!
Establish the focus, goals, and data points
Not all curriculum audits are created equal. Depending upon your school, district, or organization’s mission, your team may want to hone in on one specific goal, or go deep.
Here’s where sorting through the “alphabet soup” of terms becomes important because folks typically use DEI and CRP (culturally responsive pedagogy) as one singular concept, and not the four distinct concepts they really are. It’s important as you’re considering the focus of your audit that you’re clear on which kind of audit you’re looking to do and for what purposes.
A diversity curriculum audit is pretty straightforward because it is examining what diversity is present in the topics, repertoire, and music resources. I have found that oftentimes, this is where we start and stop as music educators. We recognize that our repertoire choices are not reflecting a very wide array of genres or identities, so we increase the number of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian composers and different genres of music. While easy to do, diversity audits don’t require any major shifts in pedagogy or systemic change.
An inclusion curriculum audit goes deeper than diversity, by also examining how students are represented and how they respond to the learning material. You can have diversity without inclusion, so in an inclusion audit you want to ascertain to what extent are students’ own experiences and the experiences of others being included and whether or not marginalized groups are being represented in multifaceted, affirming, and accurate ways.
Additionally, an inclusion audit examines how students are interacting with the music curriculum which gets to the pedagogy and instruction of the music curriculum: are learning tasks setting students up to be passive recipients or are they actively creating knowledge and understandings?
An equity audit goes even deeper than diversity and inclusion, by also examining who can fully engage in the music curriculum, who can partly engage or must hide parts of themselves in order to engage, and who can’t engage at all. An equity audit also involves more than just the units, lessons, repertoire, and resources by also examining the courses and music program as a whole to ascertain who benefits and who does not from the music curriculum.
A culturally responsive audit focuses specifically on the extent to which the curriculum supports a culturally responsive and relevant pedagogical approach. In many ways a culturally responsive audit will also include the elements of a diversity, inclusion, and equity audit. Here, you’re examining learning tasks and contexts for the extent to which the curriculum develops students skills in cultural competence & proficiency, academic learning & achievement, and socio-political consciousness.
Depending upon where your school, district, or organization is on their equity journey you may choose to select goals for your music curriculum audit around one, two, three, or all four of the types of audits I described.
Either way, the goals you select should all have specific data points that you establish for when the team later reviews curriculum material. For example, if your school’s mission statement names preparing students for a diverse and global society, you may choose a goal for your music curriculum audit to ascertain to what extent your music curriculum supports this. One data point may be counting the number of countries represented in suggested repertoire.
Review curriculum materials to gather data on each goal
Once you’ve established the focus, specific goals, and data points for the audit, then the team reviews curriculum materials in order to gather the data.
Music curriculum materials that should be reviewed include:
- Scope & sequences (the standards, concepts, and skills to be taught in a course and the order in which they should be taught)
- Pacing guides (suggested length of time for units of study or concert cycles)
- Unit & Concert plans (outline of what students should know, be able to do, and understand after a unit of learning or concert cycle; summative assessment; primary learning tasks)
- Individual daily lesson and rehearsal plans
- Assessment tools
- Suggested repertoire & resources, including student facing materials
Survey students and parents/community
A thorough curriculum audit through a lens of cultural responsiveness and DEI must include not only the music educators who deliver the curriculum, but also the folks who it’s designed for: the students and their families/communities!
Surveying students and parents/community members to find out their perspective and experiences are an integral part of the process that should not be skipped. Having a thick skin will be important, but ultimately if our aim is to create equitable, culturally responsive music programs, then we must also examine to what extent that is apparent to our students and their families. You may have a very clear goal, but that goal is not coming across to students and their families, so you need to find out from them how they’re experiencing the curriculum so that you can make adjustments accordingly.
If you’re auditing a pre-packaged curriculum that you haven’t yet adopted, survey your students and families for their experiences with the current curriculum, or if your music program is new, survey them to ask about their hopes and vision for music learning.
Compile findings, reflect on data, and identify key actions for improvement
After reviewing the music curriculum materials and surveying your students and their families, as well as surveying any music educators not a part of the core audit team, then you’ll need to compile the findings and reflect on the data.
You’ll likely have gathered a ton of information, so organize the info into categories: what’s going well, opportunities for improvement, and overall themes and trends you see in the data. This will allow you and the audit team to clearly identify which key actions should be taken in order for the music curriculum to align with your school, district, or organization’s mission and goals.
Make a plan for action steps
Finally, consider each of the actions your team has identified and make a clear plan for each.
For example, if it’s been discovered that learning tasks are more teacher centered than learner centered, a plan of action may include revising learning tasks and then scheduling a series of professional development workshops for music educators to learn how to best implement them. Or, in auditing a pre-packaged music curriculum you may discover that it is not as well-aligned to your school, district, or organizations goals as you would like and your team decides to go with another curriculum or work with a consultant to help you create your own.
Either way, make sure your plan of action is laid out with clear action steps so you can achieve your goals!
Taking a Critical Lens to Your Music Curriculum
The overall purpose of a music curriculum audit through a culturally responsive and equity lens is to identify what is going well and what areas have opportunities for improvement so that your music curriculum is well-positioned to align to your school, district, or organization’s mission and create an engaging, equitable, culturally responsive learning experience for your music learners.
As we all continue to address the need for the field of music education to place equity & cultural responsiveness at the center, conducting a curriculum audit through an explicit lens for cultural responsiveness and equity is key as we work together to rid our music curricula of the bias, stereotypes, and inaccessibility that create inequity for so many of our students.
Have you conducted a music curriculum audit before?
Have you or your music team conducted a music curriculum audit before? What was that experience like and what actions did you take afterwards? Share in the comments below!
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