Knowledge Production beyond Local and National Blindspots: Remedying Professional Ocularcentrism of Diversity in Music Teacher Education

Overview & Synopsis

In this article, we argue that mainstream discourses of diversity in music education are ocularcentric; that is, they provide a one-sided way of understanding diversity that has prevented music educators from seeing our biases. In remedying these local and national professional blindspots, we propose transnational knowledge production, which we explore through our own experiences in an ongoing research project aiming to co-develop intercultural music teacher education through institutional collaboration. We argue for a heterogenous, kaleidoscopic reflexivity towards diversity that takes into account the complexity of intercultural negotiation through knowledge production, including the ethico-political dimensions of such interactions. We believe such reflexivity to be one of the most important goals for music teacher education today.