MUSIC AS A PEDAGOGICAL TOOL AND EPISTEMOLOGY WITHIN A MULTILITERACIES APPROACH TO UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

Abstract

Music remains an underexplored resource in university classrooms despite its potential to facilitate learning in several ways. Music not only possesses instrumental value as a learning aid, fostering content retention, engagement, enjoyment, and creativity. Introducing music into learning can also positively disrupt educational practices skewed towards text-centric and linear forms of logic, and can enrich knowledge offerings with affective and embodied forms of knowing, challenging assumptions of what counts as legitimate knowledge. This article investigates the educational benefits of music in university education from both perspectives. It investigates the instrumental and epistemic benefits of music by reviewing available research on the topic before presenting impressions gained from experimenting with music in academic literacy lectures at the North-West University. A social semiotic multiliteracies perspective underlies both parts of the research. A multiliteracies approach to literacy promotes multimodality, i.e. engagement with sound, gesture, and visuals besides written and spoken language, and frames literacy as a dynamic and socially rooted phenomenon. The research ultimately argues that a multiliteracies approach to not only literacy, but education generally, can afford music deserved space as both a pedagogical instrument and legitimate epistemology in university classrooms.