Tales from the Pub, the Records, and the Theatre: Using Narrative Inquiry to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in Music Education

This chapter demonstrates the use of Burke’s (1962) dramatic pentad to explore and embellish narrative data in music education: turning stories into narratives. The dramatistic pentad is a theoretical framework created to better understand human behavior and communication. The pentad consists of five key elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Using the pentad as a research tool, I present three case studies of sharing stories of practice through the three stages of validation, exploration, and explication. In my experience as a music teacher educator in the multicultural society of Israel, I have been troubled by a lack of recognition and legitimacy for various culturally specific forms of musical experience, and musical expression in the music classroom is a double loss; students and teachers lose the chance to feel validated in the music classroom, and the music classroom loses the chance to become a much more diverse and inclusive space. This chapter presents three case studies of sharing stories of practice through the three stages of validation, exploration, and explication. The chapter includes (a) Gilad’s journey from a Jerusalem pub to the establishment of a new school of Eastern musical pedagogies, (b) Peleg’s autoethnographic video–voice composition that transformed into a middle school curriculum on progressive rock music, and (c) Arwa’s childhood spoken and photo narrative translated into a study unit on the theatre, opera, and song of Egyptian singer and composer Sayed Darwish, who is popular among Israeli Palestinian communities. Basing this study on tales emerging as stories expanded into narratives—and relying on Burke to do so—evokes an important link between literary rhetoric and qualitative education research that exemplifies the inherent aesthetic underpinnings of narrative research. This chapter includes multimodal testimonies in audio-visual supplements presented via QR links.