Disrupting Whiteness: An Autoethnographic Perspective of a White Teacher's Journey from Teacher-Directed to Student-Directed Elementary Music Education

Throughout my career as an elementary music educator, I constantly sought ways to decenter myself as the instructor and make space for student agency and independence to flourish. However, my efforts over 10 years were rooted in Western Eurocentric thought. Where I thought I was creating a more egalitarian environment, my Whiteness shielded me from the ways that I perpetuated racial injustice in my classroom. The purpose of this autoethnographic inquiry was to interrogate my career-long journey from teacher-directed instruction towards informal, self-directed, play-based music education through the lens of critical Whiteness scholarship (e.g., Applebaum, 2016; Bradley, 2007; DiAngelo, 2018; Matias, 2016a), to: (a) locate where I perpetuated Whiteness and where, if at all, I disrupted it; (b) connect my personal stories to theories of Whiteness and trends in education and music education to understand the insidious nature of Whiteness more deeply; and (c) revise and reimagine my stories as examples of more emancipatory and racially just elementary music education. I embraced the act of writing as a primary means of inquiry for my study. I used artifacts (i.e., lesson plans, photos, videos, archived emails, and documents) to create a career timeline. I wrote vignettes to capture my memories. Simultaneously, in the form of imagined emails between myself as a scholar and myself as a practitioner, I embraced a rhizomatic approach to knowledge creation through Jackson and Mazzei's (2023) "thinking with theory" to plug the vignette data into various concepts from the Whiteness scholarship to discover new insights into my Whiteness and how it manifested throughout my career. I synthesized the findings to identify patterns in my perpetuation of Whiteness, for example (but not limited to) colonization of minds, thinking in binaries (right/wrong, good/bad), racist assumptions, White saviorism, appropriation of Native American and African music's, aesthetic perfectionism rooted in Western European classical music notions of aesthetic beauty, White fragility and other strong emotional reactions to Whiteness, various discursive moves to avoid thinking about my Whiteness, and a bravado facade I would wear to save face when questioned about my Whiteness. I found a paradox in my attempts to foster a more egalitarian classroom and allocate power to my students. On one side, I challenged traditional notions of classrooms and teacher authority (rooted in Whiteness). However, on the other, my interventions often used Whiteness logic, rendering many of my attempts to transition from a teacher- directed to student-directed classroom not a fundamental disruption of the Whiteness but a perpetuation of it. I still believe in this project and think children should have agency over their music education. This dissertation has taught me that, due to the insidious nature of Whiteness, any attempt I make--as a White man--at fostering emancipatory education must include a thorough interrogation of Whiteness lest I perpetuate the very thing I am looking to dismantle. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]