Becoming an educator: identity, music education, and privilege

Abstract

This study is an intertwined critical autoethnography through which my experiences, my stories, are woven together with memories of family, students, and teaching career. Together, the telling of these stories will explore how I negotiated my identity development throughout my middle and high school experiences at a time when I could have been labeled as an at-risk student. The development into my professional career and personal life all influenced strongly by my participation in music education. Filtering these stories and memories through the lens of critical whiteness theory, this study interrogates the social assumptions that may be placed on at-risk students, exploring how these assumptions function within the context of access within our current music education structures, and investigates the ways in which social support systems allow opportunities for access of white male students and privilege in music education. An overarching question guiding this research is: How does the interrogation of such white privileges inform how one develops their identity as a music educator, a researcher, an academic, a husband, a father, a human, as well as, the curricular structures in place guiding access within music education?