'I don't know who I am, but life is for learning': The public pedagogical context of popular protest music (original) (raw)

The key topics explored in this paper relating to informal and non-formal contexts of learning, are at first constructed around notions traditionally associated with adult and post-compulsory education as evoked by Joni Mitchell in her song 'Woodstock' from 1970, and as used in my title: 'I don't know who I am, but life is for learning'. In terms of the social change sentiments and underlying themes of hope for a better world the lyrics explore, Mitchell's song seems vastly removed and remote from the times, mainstream culture and any part of the official curriculum of formal, institutional education and schooling today. Although looking back on the time when the song was produced tends to bring up a rear view of an era shrouded in mythology as captured in notions such as the " sixties of popular consciousness " (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998:2), a growing chasm exists between the possible imagined futures in Mitchell's song and what has become the present outlook in the societies of late capitalism. In particular, while explored as an underlying theme in Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, there is a distinct absence of optimism in progressive politics and social change in today's mass mediated neoliberal consumer culture. While perhaps not protest music in the same sense as so-called 'finger-pointing', 'topical' or 'message' songs from earlier in the 1960s produced by singer/songwriter/ performers including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, what Mitchell's critical thought-provoking song does is connect the context of protest music with that of education. Indeed, even in this very small snippet from the lyrical text of Woodstock, Mitchell alludes to or at least evokes notions of lifelong and life-wide learning, as she questions her identity in relation to the world in the present and as it unfolds into the possibilities and very real, potential dangers of the future. However, it is not only the ever-insightful lyrics of Mitchell's song that connects socio-political/sociocultural protest, resistance and dissent produced as popular music with the wider context of education; popular protest music is itself a context of life-wide and lifelong learning. As a radical practice and critical form of contemporary mass culture, it is bound together with adult learning and education for social change through the coinciding mythologies at the ontological core and epistemological intent of both protest music and critical pedagogy: to bring about social change through raising critical consciousness. With its starting point in these coinciding mythologies and in the intersection of the purposes or objectives of protest music with education for social change, this paper conceptualises social protest produced as popular music, as a public pedagogical context. In doing this, this paper: explores the inherent knowledge and cultural production and exchange processes of protest music as a form of mass-/popular music; examines how musicians as performers and producers of popular/protest music texts might be understood as public pedagogues; and investigates how the texts produced through performance by protest musicians might be considered pedagogical. Lastly, this paper grapples with the question as to how consumers/users of protest music might be considered adult or non-traditional learners, as they experience this radical practice and critical form of contemporary mass culture as pedagogy, occurring in informal and non-formal contexts of learning.