The pedagogy of a prison and community music programme: Spaces for conflict and safety

Abstract

Using theoretical concepts taken from the field of human geography to analyse the conflictual elements within music programmes, this paper presents new empirical research that unpacks the complex pedagogy employed by community musicians with the aim of beginning to address two recent criticisms of community music scholarship: a) community musicians only report positive outcomes and b) community musicians are not interested in scholarly analyses of their work. We begin with a review of literature presenting positive findings and discuss the methodological challenges of community music research. We introduce the key geographical concepts used to analyse the empirical data. After a presentation and discussion of facilitation pedagogy, we finish by suggesting that understanding the work of the community musician through geographical concepts provides a new way to analyse and theorize how a community music facilitator works, thus acknowledging the conflictual element of such work that is often tacit in research.