It is my belief that a prevailing colonial mentality in higher education dance spaces, as it relates to jazz dance, is responsible for the lack of serious engagement and appropriate regard. This article makes the argument for the decolonization of higher education spaces, advocating for fuller engagement with the jazz genre and positioning it to…

In this essay, we center hip-hop culture and Black cultural legacies. We envision and offer a two-fold framework which illuminates the intersection between the two. We explore ways that the Black cultural experience (or better yet Black cultural praxis) has always brilliantly and organically demonstrated the shape and form of a scholarship of…

In world music ensembles such as African and African Caribbean percussion ensembles, the Gamelan ensemble, and the Latin marimba ensemble, members may sing a song, play instruments, and dance simultaneously. This practice is known as music multitasking. For musicians in Western art music traditions, music multitasking can be a challenge. This…

This article revisits the "jongo" activity 'Pisei na Pedra' (2014) integrated into the "Nossa Casinha" guide (Martins & Sala, 2022) for teaching Portuguese to migrant children. "Jongo" is seen as an Afro-Brazilian form of expression, encompassing chants, drumming, collective dance, and spirituality (Rufino, 2014,…

Somatic memoirs from the author's participation at dance intensives with acclaimed dancer-choreographer Moustapha Bangoura in the West African Republic of Guinea reveal how solo dance experiences can test acoustic literacy, promote music interaction, and foster an aptitude for movement invention. These skills are fundamental to West African dance…

Rhythmic virtuosity or moving with "percussive attack" is an ultimate performance quality for Black/African dance. The practice of musicality is a window into a dynamic system of intersubjective communal creativity. Drumming, for example, provides percussive sensorial information that directs a dancer's somatic and choreographic…

Hip-hop is an African folk art birthed in America. Whether one simply observes the tonal language that puffs the breath of life into the lyric prose of rap music, the poly-rhythms of the "boom-bap" rhythmic phrasings that became a fixture of New York rap music in the late 1980s, the winding syncopation from the pounding "808"…

Inspired by Hip-Hop pedagogy and the Krip-Hop movement, this paper aims to address the limits of inclusive education for disabled migrant students, by drawing on the community event "I am Hip-Hop" that took place in June 2019 in Italy. Through this community intervention, migrant and disabled migrant youth were provided a creative…

This article narrates the performance pedagogies created by the Rivers of Meeting project in the Afro-Indigenous fishing community of Cabelo Seco, Marabá, in the Brazilian Amazon. Performed on the thresholds between paradigms of "good living" and industrial development, three short stories show how young arts educators contribute to the…

As globalization endures onslaughts from neo-state nationalism, examining the role that dances from non-Western cultures play in facilitating intercultural education is necessary. This article critically examines the intercultural reflections and meanings that student performers constructed from learning and performing the movements, techniques,…

The concept of ngoma is present throughout Eastern and Southern Africa. Ngoma refers to the tradition of expression via music, drumming, dance, and storytelling. History, values, education, and even identity can be transmitted between generations. This article traces the experiences of a music teacher from the United States traveling and studying…

This article examines the musical enculturation and early education of Wagogo children of the Dodoma region in central Tanzania. In support of the enculturation premise, long-standing practices in musical enculturation among the Wagogo are described, most of which are continuing today. The Wagogo hold to the belief that the behaviours of both…

The Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble is a Ghanaian drum and dance ensemble that focusses on music in the Ewe tradition. It is based in an elementary school in the Greater Toronto Area and consists of students in Grade 4 through Grade 8. Students in the ensemble study Ghanaian traditional Ewe drumming and dancing in the oral tradition. Nine students…

I explore the role and value of African music in education, by drawing from a study of Grade 5 learners at a school in the Eastern Cape, which was designed to answer the question: Could Xhosa children in South Africa sing Xhosa indigenous songs significantly better than European folk songs? The experimental group received instruction in Xhosa…

While there is a keen interest in indigenous African instrumental music among South African university music students, indigenous music instruments such as the "umrhubhe" (musical bow without a calabash resonator) have not found their way into the classroom. Most music departments focus on the teaching and learning of western instruments…