Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding teaching and learning experiences in Indigenous Australian women's music and dance.

Dunbar-Hall, Peter

Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding teaching and learning experiences in Indigenous Australian women's music and dance

Elizabeth Mackinlay 2007

Peter Lang, Bern (European University Studies Series 11 Education, Vol 932), 294pp+CD-ROM, ISBN 978 3 03910 825 1

Mackinlay's Disturbances and Dislocations engages the reader through its integration of what might seem disparate fields: Aboriginal Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education. Yet, considering recent music literature based on ethnomusicological fieldwork, such as Tim Rice's May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian music and Paul Berliner's Thinking In Jazz: The infinite art of improvisation, this is not an uncommon undertaking, as increasingly work that would once have been considered ethnomusicological in nature now includes detailed discussion of the ways music passes from one person to another and how these ways of transmission reflect the nature and values of music in different settings. The difference with Mackinlay's work is that it foregrounds issues of pedagogy. These issues are not about the strategies used by a group of Yanyuwa women from Borroloola (Northern Territory) to teach their songs and dances when they are brought to the University of Queensland to work with Mackinlay. Rather, the issues are those of identity as researcher or researched, of gender in ownership of music and dance and rights to performance of them, of appropriateness of the undertaking, of acceptance of Indigenous knowledges, of student reactions to the Yanyuwa, and of how all of these contribute to learning by Mackinlay's students and by Mackinlay herself. This is not a neatly controlled site of teaching and learning; the teaching by Yanyuwa women opens many confronting areas of debate. What results is similarly thought provoking.

Mackinlay organises all of this around a series of deconstructive case studies. First, the researcher and the field of research (her lecture series in an Indigenous Studies course) are analysed to show disjunctures between standard university teaching and Mackinlay's approach. That Mackinlay is by marriage a member of Yanyuwa kinship groupings confuses the issue of lecturer identity, as she is both insider to university culture (thus outsider to Indigenous Australian identity) and insider to Indigenous identity markers and outsider to the established norm of Australian university staff profiles. This is followed by coverage of current debates over performance as pedagogy, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of performance studies. Mackinlay proactively positions the teaching in this course as 'against the grain', and teases out the voices of the participants in the discourse that is her lecture room. Bakhtin's dialogism figure strongly here; in the Australian context this leads to a complex site made up of embodied versions of teachers/learners, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, female/male, urban/non-urban and the cultural, historical and political baggage associated with and colouring each of these dichotomies. All of these collide in acts of learning and teaching. Data on her students provide a background to understanding how they approach learning with the Yanyuwa women; the final sections of the book theorise about embodiment and voice as elements of the university study of a specific Indigenous Australian women's repertoire.

I am biased in favour of this book. It echoes my own approach to many issues and combines an ethnomusicological approach to music research with knowledge of pedagogic theory. It touches on gender studies and autoethnography; its visual impact (through the use of different fonts and typefaces) gives a sense of the voices that Mackinlay needs to cover. Much is clarified from watching the accompanying CD of filmed excerpts from Mackinlay's teaching space. Based on my recent use of these with my own students, arguments are raised, personal beliefs are challenged and levels of discomfort are created. Mackinlay sets out to remove people from their comfort zones, so my students' reactions to these filmed excerpts were evidence of her success. As an example of inter-disciplinary writing Disturbances and Dislocations provides much to think through, particularly in description of teaching and learning. It adopts a confronting stance in many ways, in the style of one of the authors Mackinlay draws on, bel hooks, who titles one of her books Teaching to Transgress. Transgression in Mackinlay's case is sanctioned as a way ahead.

REFERENCES

Berliner, Paul 1994 Thinking in Jazz: The infinite art of improvisation, Chicago University Press.

hooks, bel 2004 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom, Routledge, New York.

Rice, Tim 1994 May It Fill your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian music, Chicago University Press.

Reviewed by Peter Dunbar-Hall

University of Sydney

<p.dunbar-hall@usyd.edu.au>