Sound Beginnings: Learning, Communicating, and Making Sense with Sound

The ongoing work by educators responding to calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion in music education shows the breadth of difficult work that has been accomplished as well as the challenging work that lies ahead. Our work explores efforts to rethink music education—for all—from the ground up, which requires disrupting many of the norms through which music education has been conventionally understood. In this article, we bring together lessons learned to offer five recommendations for music pedagogy and sound-based inquiry that support a more inclusive understanding of music—one that situates aural/sound/music learning experiences as actively critical and collaborative practices. We suggest that by developing a contextualized, community-based, learner-oriented model, we might be better equipped to create opportunities for all learners.