Worldviews, Musical Knowing and Activity Systems: Towards a World-Centred Music Education

The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review in England highlights a growing tension between official policy narratives and the lived realities of musical learning. While the Review foregrounds culturally grounded oracy within English, it simultaneously reinforces western stave notation and instrumental performance as the principal markers of progression in Music. Such a framing narrows the expressive and creative dimensions of the curriculum and risks marginalising learners whose musical identities are shaped by oral, embodied and participatory traditions. Drawing on ethnomusicological understandings of music as sociocultural practice, this paper argues that these policy shifts work against a world-centred vision of music education.
To analyse how diverse musical traditions, classroom practices and curriculum expectations intersect, the paper employs Engeström’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), which conceptualises learning as an activity system shaped by tools, rules, histories and communities. This lens makes visible the contradictions between policy-driven goals, the multiplicity of musical practices that pupils bring to school, and the realities of classroom musicking. Integrating CHAT with Turino’s distinction between presentational and participatory fields, the paper suggests that a worldviews approach can illuminate the values, identities and cultural narratives through which pupils make sense of musical experience, while keeping embodied musical participation at the centre of knowing. Examples will illustrate how oral learning, improvisation and communal musicking function as inclusive, culturally responsive pedagogies. The paper argues that re-centring these practices (rather than deepening reliance on notation) offers a more equitable and genuinely world-centred model of music education.