Community service learning with first peoples

Community music educators worldwide face the challenge of preparing their students for working in increasingly diverse cultural contexts. These diverse contexts require distinctive approaches to community music-making that are respectful of, and responsive to, the customs and traditions of that cultural setting. For many community musicians this might mean engaging with forms of community music-making that sit outside their own cultural traditions, comfort zones, or commonly used facilitation techniques. Engaging in these different cultural environments can also prompt these community musicians to critically reflect on, problematize, and deepen their understandings of the field of community music and its core principles. The challenge for community music educators then becomes finding pedagogical approaches and strategies that both facilitate these sorts of intercultural learning experiences for their students, and engage with communities in culturally appropriate ways. This chapter unpacks these challenges and possibilities, and explores how the pedagogical strategy of community service learning can facilitate these sorts of dynamic inter-cultural learning opportunities. Specifically, it focuses on engaging with Australian First Peoples, and draws on eight years of community service learning in this field.