International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Wentink, C. (2024). Relating to the ‘musical homes’ of my diverse music theory students: An autoethnography. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 24(si2.9). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea24si2.9

As a Western classically trained music theory lecturer teaching students from different African cultures and backgrounds, I often struggle to relate to my students on a musical level as I experience that our ‘musical homes,’ as described by Odendaal (2021), are different. In this article I adopted an autoethnographic research approach by drawing on my journey and story as a music theory lecturer. The research question guiding this research was: How can reflection on my music theory teaching journey help me to relate better to the musical homes of my diverse students? The findings indicated that creative work and cooperative learning were useful in relating to the musical homes of my students and also helped the students to satisfy the three psychological needs for intrinsic motivation – competence, autonomy and relatedness – as addressed in self-determination theory (SDT) and lead the way to academic success.