Drawing on original interviews with improvising musicians, on critical pedagogy and cultural studies, and on the authors' personal histories with improvised music as a form of activism, community-based pedagogy, Jamming the Classroom examines how the teaching and learning of improvisational musical practices can be understood as vital and publicly resonant acts that generate new forms of knowledge, new understandings of identity and community, and new imaginative possibilities. The book takes its cue notjust from the learning in conventional classrooms and credentialing institutions but also from the work that happens in and through broader communities of practice. Heble and Stewart ask how the improvisational practices of artists and the internal educational endeavors within community groups model--and enact--new forms of community-making and critical thinking, as well as what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice and the context of material practices and struggles for institutional authority.
Drawing on a mix of collaborative autoethnography, secondary literature, interviews with leading improvisers, and personal anecdotal material, Jamming the Classroom discusses the pedagogy of musical improvisation as a vehicle for teaching, learning, and enacting social justice. Heble and Stewart write that to jam the classroom is to argue for a renewed understanding of improvisation as both a musical and a social practice; to activate the knowledge and resources associated with improvisational practices in an expression of noncompliance with dominant orders of knowledge production; and to recognize in the musical practices of aggrieved communities something far from the reaches of conventional forms of institutionalized power, yet something equally powerful, urgent, and expansive. With this definition of jamming the classroom in mind, Heble and Stewart argue that even as improvisation gains recognition within mainstream institutions (including classrooms in universities), it needs to be understood as a critique of dominant institutionalized assumptions and epistemic orders. Suggesting a closer consideration of why musical improvisation has been largely expunged from dominant models of pedagogical inquiry in both classrooms and communities, this book asks what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice.
Musical improvisation as a vehicle for teaching, learning, and enacting social justice
