True Story 10.17
The kindergarten music activity that dissolved into chaos
The setting for this story
The events described in this story occurred in an American school and involved a kindergarten class that was being observed by an anthropologist named Carol. Here’s her account.
A story of misaligned minds22
The kindergarten class I was observing consisted of twenty-one white children and eight Black children. On the day of this observation, the class’s regular white female teacher introduced an activity called “The Valentine dance.”
After she began playing a recording of a Valentine dance tune, the teacher directed the pupils to form two parallel lines, boys in one, girls in the other, and to face each other. She demonstrated a patterned dance with repeated sequences, a type of uncomplicated English country dance. The children were asked to imitate her demonstration and began doing so.
Suddenly the Black children, except one girl, left their positions and clustered, giggling, at one end of the parallel lines. They hand-slapped and finger-snapped in time with the music while the white children continued attempting to dance.
A Black boy, Walter, left the cluster and ran between the lines of children singing, “Be mine, you sweetie valentine.” He threw kisses, clapped his hands, and performed rhythmic body movements. He physically paired some white boys with various girls. Approaching his close friend, a white boy, he said, “Man, you don’t want her! Let’s move you around.” The white boy then joined the Black children’s cluster.
Upset, the teacher escorted Walter, over his pleas, to the principal’s office while the student teacher coaxed the cluster of Black pupils to join the dance. Two girls partnered and joined, to the ridicule of the Black males. The student teacher reprimanded the males, who were consumed with giggles, and sent one boy behind a partition as punishment. He began throwing objects over the partition, which disrupted the dance. The children began to run around and hit each other.
A few days later, I observed this same kindergarten class go to the music room for one of their weekly sessions with the school’s Black female music teacher.
After the twenty-nine children were seated together on the music room floor, the teacher played a familiar song on the piano and began singing. The children joined in the singing.
Suddenly, Walter ran to the front and began rhythmic body movements. He snapped his fingers in a tempo different from that of the music teacher, who was continuing to play and sing. A Black girl, exclaiming “Cool, man!” joined his finger-snapping. Then the music teacher began adapting her piano tempo to match their snapping.
Some of the white children stopped singing to observe the Black pupils. A few of them stamped their feet and began marching, some stepping in synch with the new tempo while others seemed unable to do so. The Black children, clapping their hands and rhythmically moving their bodies, followed the white marchers around the room. White children who were continuing to observe began singing and clapping; some attempted rhythmic hip movements.
Carol’s question
Why did the Valentine dance, a potentially enjoyable musical activity being directed by the kindergarteners’ regular teacher, disintegrate into chaos when, only days later, these same twenty-nine pupils became thoroughly engaged in a musical activity with their school’s music teacher?
Critique of story 10.17
Answers to Carol’s question emerge from a comparison of these two events, both of which included Walter in the role of instigator. The key differences between them were the identity of the teacher in charge and the nature of the musical activity – one involved dancing, the other, singing while pupils were seated on the floor. Let’s begin with the engaging music room activity.
The Black music teacher was responsive to Walter’s apparent intention to compel changes to the tempo she had been setting on the piano. She seemed not to be bothered by the spontaneous emergence of a child’s leadership, followed by the other children’s defining for themselves the style of their personal contributions. It’s likely that the music teacher recognized, consciously or subconsciously, that Walter’s actions were consistent with the Black cultural pattern in which an audience member asserts event leadership and solicits other audience members’ participation. Her flexibility enabled the music activity to proceed in a new way without complications. It is especially noteworthy that, although the Blacks made up only about a quarter of this class’s membership, the white children appeared happy to follow their lead.
During the classroom Valentine dance, this class’s regular teacher introduced the children to a prearranged, historically grounded, explicitly structured group dance routine. The white kindergarteners seemed content to adhere to this dance’s predetermined pattern. But the Black children, prompted by Walter’s initiative, seemed to experience the activity as an opportunity to generate their own innovative, expressive pattern of gesture and dance.
This was not acceptable to the white teacher. Did she view herself as guardian of a venerable old dance tradition? Was she being a responsible, no-nonsense pedagogue? Was she unaccustomed to, or disapproving of, a cultural pattern that encourages any audience member to assert group leadership and solicit participation (a possibility because this is a Black pattern, not a white one)? We don’t know. We know only that she emphatically disallowed the Black children’s initiative. That sparked a series of actions culminating in the inglorious demise of the Valentine dance.
For thought
My critique above relies in part on the views of a widely respected scholar.23 He implies that if only the white teacher had been flexible, the Valentine dance could have proceeded successfully.
That’s an oversimplification. The scholar ignores the second key contrast between the two “musical” events: The Valentine dance obliged the children to replicate prearranged, explicitly patterned bodily movements with which most or all of them were unfamiliar. In sharp contrast, the music room activity involved only singing familiar songs while the children were seated on the floor. That’s a big difference! Consider these questions:
- If the white teacher had flexibly allowed the Black children to continue doing their thing, what might have happened?
- If the Black teacher had been the one to introduce the explicitly structured Valentine dance, how might that have proceeded?
- If the white teacher were playing and singing a familiar tune while the children were seated on the floor, how might she have reacted to Walter’s intervention?
I am not hinting that I know the answer to any of those questions. I do not.
Cultural complications in classrooms don’t always have simple explanations. Some resist our attempts to identify a single factor (e.g., personal inflexibility), or a single individual (e.g., a white teacher who was dealing with Black pupils), as being responsible for whatever went awry. Other complications easily fit into theoretical categories – the white teacher’s approach was more analytic, which the Black’s was more holistic – but these categories add little to our understanding.
The deeper we probe to discover the causes of complex human interactions, the more challenging it becomes to arrive at a convincing explanation.
Related stories
Story 10.12 similarly describes a case in which a researcher observed a group of children in class with either of two familiar, but culturally different, teachers.
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Endnotes:
22 Koogler, 126–30.
23 Kochman, 274–78.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.