Music Theory

A Theoretically Grounded Framework for Culturally Sustaining Music Education


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The Importance of Theory in Culturally Sustaining Music Education

For generations, educators have debated whether theory truly matters for everyday teaching. Practical, immediate demands in the classroom can feel far more urgent than abstract ideas. Why should a teacher spend time theorizing when students need lessons, materials, and management? Theory can seem like a distraction from the real work.

Yet theory is never absent from teaching. As Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) explain, a person's worldview functions like a cultural map — it guides how one navigates life and new experiences. Every decision a teacher makes springs from an underlying theoretical perspective, whether or not they are aware of it. This worldview shapes every student interaction and every way a concept is delivered. Unnoticed, these assumptions profoundly affect learners. Studying theory enables teachers to examine their own perspectives critically and to understand more deeply how those perspectives shape practice. The false belief that theory can be separated from teaching — along with the invisibility of one's worldview — makes theoretical study an essential part of music education.

Beyond illuminating personal assumptions, theory reveals how complex, hegemonic inequality operates in schools. Love (2019) describes theories as explanations of how the world works, who it denies, and how structures uphold oppression. Denying the relevance of theory can be compared to politicians who dismiss politically correct language or White people who claim to be colorblind — each stance privileges the status quo and those who benefit from dominant ideology while harming those marginalized by it. Theory, therefore, provides tools for uncovering how both individual beliefs and systemic ideologies contribute to educational oppression.

Why should teachers examine their worldviews and consider how theory might reshape their practice? Leonardo and Grubb (2019) argue that racial inequality in American schools persists because the worldviews of minoritized students are not acknowledged. For these students, schooling has become largely disconnected from their culture, understanding, and sense of self — it affirms neither their identity nor their experience. To support all learners effectively, educators must understand how their theoretical lens influences teaching, especially in an increasingly interconnected world.

Globalization, mass migration, technology, a global pandemic, and deepening economic divides intensify the need for diverse worldviews in education. In the United States, fewer than half of children are White, and by 2060 only one-third will be (Vespa et al., 2018). In Canada, immigrants and their children may account for between 44 and 50 percent of the population by 2036 (Morency et al., 2017). In the UK, three-quarters of population growth through 2028 will come from immigration (Nash, 2019).

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Such diversity is most visible in classrooms, where a wealth of cultural, musical, and linguistic traditions meets daily. Diverse student populations demand approaches that affirm every learner. Theoretical frameworks offers teachers the means to pursue equity and relevance. This is especially critical for music educators, since music and culture are deeply intertwined and, for many students, form a core part of identity (Good-Perkins, 2020).

Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy

Educational theories and their embedded belief systems have long shaped how children of color are taught in the United States. Before the 1970s, deficit models treated any culture outside mainstream White society as an obstacle to learning. Children from richly cultured backgrounds were pressured to set aside their communities' knowledge and ways of being. The goal was bold: abandon one's heritage to succeed in mainstream American life. As Paris (2012) describes, schools aimed to replace students' linguistic, literate, and cultural practices with what were considered superior ones.

By the 1970s and 1980s, deficit models gradually gave way to difference approaches. These approaches acknowledged that children of color had distinct cultures but still deemed those cultures unfitting for the classroom. Both models positioned students' cultural competencies outside the realm of academic achievement. This devaluation of cultural identity sparked new research exploring how students' backgrounds could instead become resources. Called resource pedagogies, these models used cultural heritage as bridge to dominant, mainstream knowledge.

It was in this context — and in response to educational research that Ladson-Billings (1995) criticized for not making its theoretical basis explicit — that she proposed culturally relevant pedagogy. When theory was not named, she argued, a default theory filled the gap, one mistaken as objective and accepted without question. A clear theoretical paradigm, she insisted, offers a worldview through which to examine research and practice. Defying the deficit orientation to African American learners, Ladson-Billings (1995) introduced culturally relevant pedagogy as a model that both attends to academic achievement and helps students accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities maintained by schools and other institutions.

Recognizing the need for reform in teacher preparation, Ladson-Billings (1995) studied teachers highly successful with African American students. Though each used different strategies, she identified common themes that became the backbone of her theory. Those educators helped their students become academically successful, culturally competent, and socio-politically critical.

Academic success refers to a student's intellectual growth in relation to the teacher's instruction and approach. Cultural competence means the student's awareness and appreciation of their culture of origin while also learning about other cultures. Socio-political consciousness names the student's ability to analyze social and political systems and policies critically.

These three tenets offered researchers in educational justice a powerful theoretical foundation.

Influenced by this work, Gay (2000) identified five elements for what she called culturally responsive teaching, designed especially for preservice programs. Gay observed that while teacher education courses supported multicultural education broadly, they often failed to equip future teachers with the skills to implement it. Using teachers' storytelling practices with African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American students as data, along with research from multiple disciplines, she framed cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for more effective teaching. According to Gay (2002), academic achievement improves for these students when they are taught through their own cultural and experiential filters.

Over time, culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies evolved into many variants. In 2014, Ladson-Billings remarked that what appeared in literature and practice was sometimes utterly unrecognizable from her original work. Twenty years after developing the theory, she called for a remix. Acknowledging both the framework's influence and the dynamic nature of culture, she supported a fresh evolution.

Paris (2012) responded to this call by offering culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP). His critique centered on the words relevant and responsive, which tend to treat a student's culture mainly as a vehicle for learning dominant culture. CSP instead aims to perpetuate and encourage cultural plurality. This stance is not merely responsive or relevant — it actively supports and sustains culture in both traditional and evolving ways shaped by a student's lived experience. Paris defined CSP as supporting young people in maintaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant competence. The term itself signals a concept and a social commitment, opening a path for further research and advocacy toward educational justice.

CSP intends to sustain the cultural ways of being of communities of color rather than eradicate them — it counters how schools have historically functioned as part of a colonial project. Pedagogically, this means recognizing students' funds of knowledge as valuable in their own right rather than merely instrumental for transmitting mainstream epistemology. Domínguez (2017) extends this idea further, introducing revitalization and calling for a decolonization of teacher education where educators engage in what she terms epistemic travel.

CSP envisions a radical departure from neoliberal approaches to equity. It demands pedagogies of cultural, linguistic, and cognitive plurality. As authors of this framework argue, honoring students' backgrounds not as stepping-stones but as living, valuable ways of knowing transforms schooling from a space of cultural erasure to one of genuine sustenance.

The shift from deficit models through difference models and resource pedagogies to sustaining pedagogies reflects growing recognition of the intrinsic worth of diverse musical communities. Each evolution has drawn increasing attention to the ways schools either welcome or erase the cultural foundations students bring with them. Culturally sustaining approaches, at their core, challenge music educators to consider what it truly means to keep cultural traditions alive, both in their historic roots and as continuously re-created in the lives of young people now navigating a rapidly changing world. These understandings push music curricula beyond mere inclusion into active cultural perpetuation.

A Framework Built for Music Classrooms

Building on the foundational theories tested in general education, music educators now have substantial groundwork for implementing CSP in the rehearsal room and the general music classroom. Traditional music programs have long prioritized Western European repertoire, notational literacy, and performance standards anchored in classical music values. This focus, when present and unquestioned, systematically excludes and marginalizes musical practices from other traditions — practices rooted in oral transmission, improvisation, collective composition, different tuning systems, or entirely different understandings of how timing relates to musical meaning and communal expression. Implementing CSP in music means recognizing these various epistemologies — ways of musical knowing — as equal partners rather than lesser forms barely acknowledged then quickly cast aside. It implies valuing Reggaeton, steelpan ensembles, blues improvisation, Balkan folksongs, Arabic maqam, gamelan traditions, or any number of diverse musics not as colorful additions to a proper lesson but as valid whole systems deserving the same depth of study and respect afforded Western notation and theory.

The volume works to problematize the historic dominance of Western classical music in school curricula and reinforces CSP as a pathway toward music classes that better serve increasingly diverse student bodies. Educated alongside these theoretical components, findings from a qualitative study conducted in an urban American high school make visible how traditional approaches stifle engagement if not outright alienate students who function from alternate cultural musical perspectives. The book goes beyond simply calling for culturally responsive connections: it helps teachers broaden their understanding of other musical epistemologies so they can fully commit culturally sustaining music pedagogy. This calls into question present practices so new frames centering the music cultures of minoritized communities can be built — not for the purpose of teaching the classical canon more efficiently but for truly maintaining the diversity of musical expression their students represent outside of school. Professional audiences such as researchers, educators students, scholars in ethnomusicology and music teacher preparation alongside participants studying classroom systems or multi-cultural education theory will gain insights applicable to changing soundscapes. This introduction in CSP empowers teachers to structure practice that deliberately maintains cultural knowing born inside their own space. Thus CSP aims its sight not merely at access — student engage, learning proceeds to advance education at its heart:

Teachers support youth in sustaining their communities' musical and linguistic competence while also providing openings into dominant cultural forms that grant broader participation in society. This differs dramatically from an older generation of multiculturalism where other musics were presented briefly during designated weeks of the year then packed away reverently but firmly; under culturally sustaining work, community traditions become stable threads woven through all routines, lesson designs, repertoire decisions and assessments designed to honor who students already are musically seasoned to shape music and collective expression.

Structural Outlook and Implementation

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Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Definition Points

  • "A theoretical model that not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate" – Ladson-Billings, 1995, p.469
  • Academic success, cultural competence, socio-political consciousness become its three integrated standards among implementation
  • "Using the cultural characteristics, experiences and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively...academic achievement of ethnically diverse students will improve when they are taught through their own cultural and experiential filters" – Gay, 2002, p.106

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Theory Supports Systematic Purpose

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The Role of Wisdom and Assessment Change

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Domínguez adds that “colonization as an explicit de jure system of political domination has ended, yes. Yet bans on ethnic studies … and assaults on agency, culture, language, and identity persist. These are the accruing injuries of coloniality” (p. 227). Bucholtz et al. (2017) extend the conversation about these “assaults on agency, culture, language, and identity” by examining language agency, asserting that “one of the most important yet most devalued resources available to youth of color is their language” (p. 44). For Paris and Alim (2017), recognizing linguistic plurality in educational settings forms a critical element of CSP. Rosa and Flores (2017) take up language agency through a “critical raciolinguistic perspective” (p. 186). In their critique of discourses of “appropriateness,” they call for dismantling the linguistic hierarchy that perpetuates the marginalization of students of color. Educators who enact CSP both permit and value their students’ linguistic practices by actively disrupting “linguistic purity” discourses (p. 185).

The linguistic and cultural heritage of students of color sits at the core of CSP. Lee (2017) broadens the discussion of “emergent” and “heritage” (Domínguez, 2017, p. 233) cultural practices within CSP by focusing on intergenerational cultural practices. A central tenet of CSP holds that culture is fluid and changeable; therefore students’ cultural practices should never be essentialized. Nonetheless, within emergent cultural forms, both Lee and Paris emphasize the importance of recognizing heritage practices. Lee (2017) describes these as a “repository of historically intergenerational cultural practices” (p. 266).

It is the simultaneous, non-binary, and non-essentializing recognition of both heritage and emergent cultural practices that enables students’ cultural identities to thrive. Yet, according to Lee, this constitutes the “dilemma” with “no simple resolution” but nevertheless “is a necessary first step” (p. 268). She notes: “as we think about what should be sustained and why, we must realize that there are always competing demands around what is historically transmitted as tradition, and new practices and allegiances that are often hybrid and emergent” (p. 268). Despite the challenge, recognizing students’ cultures in both traditional and evolving ways marks an important move toward culturally sustaining and revitalizing education.

The dimensions of CSP that Paris and Alim (2017) and the contributing scholars highlighted—cultural plurality, coloniality in education, discourses of “appropriateness,” linguistic and cultural competence, and emergent and historical practices—all hold relevance for music education and will be examined further throughout this book.

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