Towards Reconciliation: Teaching Gender and Music in the Context of Indigenous Australian Women's Performance

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Mackinlay

This paper addresses issues related to the conflicting paradigms of Western systems of knowledge and Indigenous systems of knowledge within the context of teaching about gender and music in Indigenous Australian women's performance practice. I will first describe the subject which I am currently teaching at the University of Queensland. I will then discuss the theoretical concerns related to teaching about gender and music in terms of the differences between Western and Indigenous ways of knowing about these concepts. I will then examine the conflicts which arise in the context of teaching Indigenous studies within a non-Indigenous framework. Finally, conclusions will be drawn in regard to the reconciling the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing and the implications for teaching this type of curriculum on an international scale.

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Margaret Ann (Tamara) Dicks

This is an exploratory study on drumming/song and its relationship to healing in the lives of Indigenous women living in the City of Winnipeg. The participants of this study included urban-based Indigenous women actively involved in drumming and song. An Indigenous research framework was employed using the drum as methodology in exploring and understanding Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The researcher used Indigenous searching methods (“talking circles” and the “Anishinaabe-Symbol Based Reflection” activity) to gather the women’s personal stories as they related to the topic of the study. The women identified the healing benefits of drumming/song from a holistic perspective, meaning emotional, mental, physical, and a central focus on the spiritual dimension. The outcome of the study demonstrates that Dewe-i-gan (drum) provides a holistic healing approach within the lives of the women based on Indigenous ways of seeing, understanding, and being in the world that extends beyond the mere act of drumming.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-273
Author(s):  
Paige Raibmon

AbstractThis paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence on Indigenous ground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples' unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community's initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state's legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.


Author(s):  
LeAnne Howe

This chapter introduces the reader to some of the Indigenous ways of knowing that inform the methodology of Native South studies. It illustrates how Choctaws and other Southeastern nations have turned to “core narratives as a survival strategy over millennia” of challenges posed both by the natural environment and by the “tired, hungry foreigners” who have sought refuge in Native homelands. Turning to the subject of weather prediction, Howe cites a range of writings—from Bienville’s correspondence of the early 1700s to Choctaw chief Ben Dwight’s inquiries among leaders of other tribal nations in the 1950s—as evidence not only that the tribes possessed a diversity of Indigenous knowledge “about long-term weather processes” but that they shared this knowledge intertribally, helping each other weather the threat of ecodisaster. The chapter faults Faulkner for Native characterizations that trade on stereotype, but also also, finds his imagination to be “driven” and “enlivened” by Native stories. His own ways of knowing were in some respects compatible with the story-centered epistemologies that are explored.


2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Mackinlay

One of the biggest debates in Australian Indigenous education today revolves around the many contested and competing ways of knowing by and about Indigenous cultures and the representation of Indigenous knowledges. Using Bakhtin's theories of dialogue and voice, my concern in this paper is to explore the polyphonic nature of power relations, performance roles and pedagogical texts in the context of teaching and learning Indigenous Australian women's music and dance. In this discussion, I will focus on my experiences as a lecturer in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland and my involvement in this educational setting with contemporary Indigenous performer Samantha Chalmers. Like a field experience, the performance classroom will be examined as a potential site for disturbing and dislocating dominant modes of representation of Indigenous women's performance through the construction, mediation and negotiation of Indigenous knowledge from and between both non-Indigenous and Indigenous voices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Krusz ◽  
Tamzyn Davey ◽  
Britta Wigginton ◽  
Nina Hall

Four non-Indigenous academics share lessons learned through our reflective processes while working with Indigenous Australian partners on a health research project. We foregrounded reflexivity in our work to raise consciousness regarding how colonizing mindsets—that do not privilege Indigenous ways of knowing or recognize Indigenous land and sovereignty—exist within ourselves and the institutions within which we operate. We share our self-analyses and invite non-Indigenous colleagues to also consider socialized, unquestioned, and possibly unconscious assumptions about the dominance of Western paradigms, asking what contributions, if any, non-Indigenous researchers can offer toward decolonizing health research. Our processes comprise of three iterative features—prioritizing attempts to decolonize ourselves, acknowledging the necessary role of discomfort in doing so, and moving through nonbinary and toward nondualistic thinking. With a nondual lens, working to decolonize ourselves may itself be seen as one contribution non-Indigenous researchers may offer to the collective project of decolonizing health research.


2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (S1) ◽  
pp. 23-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannie Herbert

AbstractIn this paper, I consider the importance of Indigenous studies programs, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as critical elements in enabling Indigenous Australian students to engage in the academe in ways that not only allow them to empower themselves, but, ultimately, to become effective change agents within both their own and the wider Australian community. While this paper will highlight the challenges that Indigenous Australians face in their engagement within the university learning environment, it will also reveal the increasingly successful outcomes that are being achieved. A particular focus of the paper will be to acknowledge higher education as a tool of empowerment – a process that enables people to identify and address their own issues, and to use such knowledge and understanding as the platform for personal, positive growth. Finally this paper will contextualise higher education from within an Indigenous perspective to demonstrate how Indigenous studies not only contributes to the empowerment of the individual but also has a critical role in ultimately re-positioning Indigenous Australians in the wider Australian society.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 15-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Norman

AbstractThis paper explores teaching strategies for communicating complex issues and ideas to a diverse group of students, with different educational and vocational interests, that encourage them to develop critical thinking, and explores pedagogies appropriate to the multidisciplinary field of Aboriginal studies. These issues will be investigated through discussion of a successful simulation case study, including the setting up, resourcing, conducting and debriefing. The simulated case study was an assessed component of the new elective subject, Reconciliation Studies, offered at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2003 students participated in a role-play based on events in relation to the development of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge. Students were assigned roles as stakeholders where they researched and then role-played, through their assigned characters, the multilayered and complex dimensions of this recent dispute. Students were required to reflect critically on the cultural, economic, legal and political issues that were pertinent to their stakeholder and explore the underlying racial, ethical and moral grounds for their particular standpoint. I argue that teaching strategies such as these can contribute to locating Indigenous Australian perspectives and experiences as critical within the professional profiles and practice skills of Australian university graduates.


Author(s):  
M. V. Noskov ◽  
M. V. Somova ◽  
I. M. Fedotova

The article proposes a model for forecasting the success of student’s learning. The model is a Markov process with continuous time, such as the process of “death and reproduction”. As the parameters of the process, the intensities of the processes of obtaining and assimilating information are offered, and the intensity of the process of assimilating information takes into account the attitude of the student to the subject being studied. As a result of applying the model, it is possible for each student to determine the probability of a given formation of ownership of the material being studied in the near future. Thus, in the presence of an automated information system of the university, the implementation of the model is an element of the decision support system by all participants in the educational process. The examples given in the article are the results of an experiment conducted at the Institute of Space and Information Technologies of Siberian Federal University under conditions of blended learning, that is, under conditions when classroom work is accompanied by independent work with electronic resources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Gretchen Slover

Background: This research was birthed in 2017 during a trip to Lusaka, Zambia, with the purpose of offering fourth-year, medical students attending the University of Zambia, School of Medicine, lectures on psychology topics as part of their clinical studies.  Students were also offered brief therapy sessions where they could process thoughts and feelings causing them internal struggles.  The subject of offering counseling on a regular basis was randomly discussed with the students.  From these discussions the need for this research became evident, with the intent of becoming the launching pad to brainstorm the most effective ways of developing a plan to offer counseling services for all medical students attending the University of Zambia School of Medicine. Methods: An-experimental research design, consisting of completion of a 12-item questionnaire administered by paper and pen. The inclusion criteria were the fourth year, medical students attending the University of Zambia, School of Medicine. Results:  The student responses revealed that most of them had little to no experience with counseling services, but a strong desire for them. Discussion: The goal of this study was to simply establish a need for an on-campus counseling service, the need of which has been established by the very students who would benefit.  With the acceptance of this need, the future plan is to explore the different ways in which this need can be fulfilled with minimal costs to the Medical School Program. Conclusion:  This study is the first step towards identifying the needs of the medical students and sets the ground-work for further research into the specific areas of need and mental health challenges.  More specificity in the area of demographics of students will produce a more comprehensive picture of the areas of concentration for the therapists offering services.


2020 ◽  
Vol 384 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
P. V. Menshikov ◽  
G. K. Kassymova ◽  
R. R. Gasanova ◽  
Y. V. Zaichikov ◽  
V. A. Berezovskaya ◽  
...  

A special role in the development of a pianist as a musician, composer and performer, as shown by the examples of the well-known, included in the history of art, and the most ordinary pianists, their listeners and admirers, lovers of piano music and music in general, are played by moments associated with psychotherapeutic abilities and music features. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities (using pianists as an example). The research method is a theoretical analysis of the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities: the study of the possibilities and functions of musical psychotherapy in the life of a musician as a “(self) psychotherapist” and “patient”. For almost any person, music acts as a way of self-understanding and understanding of the world, a way of self-realization, rethinking and overcoming life's difficulties - internal and external "blockages" of development, a way of saturating life with universal meanings, including a person in the richness of his native culture and universal culture as a whole. Art and, above all, its metaphorical nature help to bring out and realize internal experiences, provide an opportunity to look at one’s own experiences, problems and injuries from another perspective, to see a different meaning in them. In essence, we are talking about art therapy, including the art of writing and performing music - musical psychotherapy. However, for a musician, music has a special meaning, special significance. Musician - produces music, and, therefore, is not only an “object”, but also the subject of musical psychotherapy. The musician’s training includes preparing him as an individual and as a professional to perform functions that can be called psychotherapeutic: in the works of the most famous performers, as well as in the work of ordinary teachers, psychotherapeutic moments sometimes become key. Piano music and performance practice sets a certain “viewing angle” of life, and, in the case of traumatic experiences, a new way of understanding a difficult, traumatic and continuing to excite a person event, changing his attitude towards him. It helps to see something that was hidden in the hustle and bustle of everyday life or in the patterns of relationships familiar to a given culture. At the same time, while playing music or learning to play music, a person teaches to see the hidden and understand the many secrets of the human soul, the relationships of people.


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