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Routledge Focus on Music Education: Culturally Responsive Teaching

About the Book Series

Routledge Focus on Music Education: Culturally Responsive Teaching consists of concise monographs that focus on concepts related to culturally responsive teaching in music education. Throughout this series, we illustrate how music education is transformed by culturally responsive practices. The monographs in this series (40-50,000 words) will focus on one or more of the different facets of the following concepts.

  • Music education works best when the cultural heritage of the students is valued.
  • Music education can serve as a change agent, empowering learners to be academically competent and confident in their abilities as musicians and scholars.
  • Culturally responsive teaching is multidimensional and encompasses curriculum content, the learning context, the classroom climate, student-teacher relationships, instructional techniques, classroom management, and performance assessments.  
  • Culturally responsive teaching can transform music education by challenging traditional education practices, particularly with disenfranchised populations.  
  • Culturally responsive teaching recognizes the cultural nature of human cognition, it focuses on learning as a comprehensive, all-encompassing process, not limited to the acquisition of new and decontextualized information.
  • Culturally responsive teaching breaks the constrictions imposed by adherence to only one canon of musical knowledge and performance practice and proposes that there can be multiple and equally viable perspectives regarding how music is made and what music is valued.

Projects in this series are published in the Routledge Focus format, designed as a home for publications shorter than traditional monographs.

1 Series Title


Culturally Responsive Teaching in a High School Percussion Ensemble Validating Immigrant Identities

Culturally Responsive Teaching in a High School Percussion Ensemble: Validating Immigrant Identities

1st Edition

By Christiana Athena-Blackwell
May 25, 2025

Culturally Responsive Teaching in a High School Percussion Ensemble: Validating Immigrant Identities addresses themes of immigration, identity, and culturally responsive teaching in music education using a deep case study of Brazilian samba music in the context of a high school percussion ensemble....

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