Rethinking the Large Ensemble Paradigm: Moving Toward Epistemic Justice.

In this paper, I center the epistemic dimensions of musics and musicking to consider the ways in which the band/orchestra/choir paradigm of music education prevalent in the U.S. and Canada may be implicated in epistemic injustice. Drawing in particular on the work of Fricker (Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007), Dotson (Hypatia 26(2):236–257, 2011), and The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (Kidd et al., The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, Routledge, New York, 2017), I explore facets of epistemic injustice and apply these ideas to music education school contexts in Canada and the U.S. I further explore aspects of school music that may amount to "testimonial smothering" (Dotson 2011) and "cognitive imperialism" (Battiste in Can J Native Educ 22:16–27, 1998). Ultimately, building on existing literature on epistemic justice (Kidd et al. 2017; Fricker 2007), I theorize an epistemically just music education for school music in alignment with culturally responsive, anti-racist, and anti-colonial teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]