UC San Diego

A pronounced shift is occurring in fields concerned with contemporary education, psychology and cognition, such that learning cannot simply be conceived of as transmitting and receiving factual information. When viewed from this emerging "ecological" perspective, all knowledge is "co-constituted" by the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs and the activity in which the learner is participating: it is embodied, situated, and distributed. Yet conventional jazz pedagogy frequently treats musical "knowledge" as individual, abstract, relatively fixed and unaffected by the activity through which it is acquired and used to the detriment of more experiential, exploratory and collective approaches to improvisation. Drawing on interviews with celebrated improvisers and pedagogues, this article confronts the conventional wisdom of jazz pedagogy and argues for more responsible and responsive educational practices.