Improvised Teaching

Abstract Music educators have historically approached pedagogy from the perspective of relatively prescriptive classroom methods. However, the role of formalism is increasingly being interrogated in the field. Community music practices, along with their contingent focus on non-formal and informal approaches, are being integrated into classroom teaching and learning. This chapter describes author David H. Knapp’s experiences negotiating formalism with the implementation of the New American All-Stars, a community music program for refugee youth in Syracuse, New York. It further frames his experiences as the facilitator of the program in a dialectical relationship with the band members within Freire’s conscientização (1970). It extends Freire’s work to Ed Sarath’s recent attention to improvisation and consciousness to analyze Knapp’s pedagogical work as an act of improvisation (2018). Finally, the chapter relates Sarath’s criticism of music studies’ reliance on developing “interpretive performance specialists” to Thomas Regelski’s warning of methodolatry in music education (2002).