‘This Is My Truth, Now Tell Me Yours’: Emphasizing dialogue within Participatory Music

As a group, musicians have traditionally been resistant to conceptualizing their educational practice in participatory settings. Rather than continuing to strive for an elusive consensus, this article suggests we would do better to see our work in a different way, using the concept of dialogue to enable all of the diverse perspectives on music educational practice to have validity, as well as giving us insights into the kinds of teaching and learning exchanges that go on in Participatory Music. In particular, the concept of dialogue invites us to re-appraise some of the traditional dichotomies associated with music and music education – e.g. access/excellence, process/product, ethical/technical – so that they too can be seen as positions that ‘widen dialogic space’.