“Who Taught Us to Sit Still?”: Audience Participation and the Elementary Music Classroom

In elementary music classrooms, expectations for audience participation often stem from Eurocentric musical traditions and Whiteness. These expectations can become so normalized in music education that their cultural and racial histories are overlooked. As such, the purpose of this article is to explore the roots of Whiteness surrounding audience participation in elementary music education and to consider how teachers might educate students about different expectations across musical and cultural settings. I propose a framework for teaching audience participation: Balance, Contextualize, and Practice & Compare. Through this framework, elementary music teachers might provide students with opportunities to understand and experience audience participation across musical and cultural contexts while reconsidering which musical traditions hold curricular value. Ultimately, elementary music teachers and their students must be willing to question the assumptions they bring to musical experiences, including those they have long accepted without question.