The Experiences of Students of Color in an Undergraduate Music Education Program

Students of Color (SoC) in higher education experience harassment at higher rates than their White counterparts and have reported feeling isolated, invisible, concerned for their safety, hypervisible, and/or a lack of belonging as they navigate the “fortified,” “contradictory,” and “counter” (Harwood et al., 2018) spaces within a university campus. Documented to a lesser extent within the music education literature, shared experiences reveal a concerning picture in which SoC face barriers to college admission, feelings of isolation within preparation programs, and obstacles to teacher licensure. Drawing on the tenets of critical race theory, the purpose of this collective narrative was to explore the detailed experiences of SoC in an undergraduate music education program. We collected data using a three-interview protocol with six participants and wrote and rewrote narrative texts anchored around a pervasive quality, arriving at a potential representation of each participant’s restorying. In this article, we share excerpts from this constellation of stories and highlight connections and divergences across narratives, which include invisibility and isolation, the importance of counterspaces, inadequacy, and building on cultural community wealth. We offer points of reflection for the field and encourage music teacher educators to consider the ways we are complicit in the problematic structures of higher music education.