The Unheard Learner: Adolescent Musical Identity and Student Voice in Ghanaian Music Education

Abstract

This study aims to bring adolescent musical life into clearer view within Ghanaian music education scholarship, which has advanced curriculum reform, teacher preparation, and culturally grounded music-making yet has given limited attention to adolescents as musical knowers who listen, perform, create, and use music to construct identity and belonging in and beyond school. This structured critical literature review synthesises Ghanaian music education scholarship with international research on adolescent musical behaviour, identity, informal learning, and student voice. Literature was identified through Google Scholar searches conducted between March and June 2026, supplemented by citation tracing, using search terms combined around Ghanaian music education, adolescent musical identity, informal learning, student voice, and jama; 43 sources published between 1986 and 2025 met the inclusion criteria and were organised around four analytic themes rather than summarised individually. The synthesis finds a persistent disjuncture between students' everyday musical practices and the knowledge privileged in formal music education. Jama, the communal musical practice of Ghanaian boarding schools, illustrates that students already create, transmit, and sustain complex musical knowledge informally, offering a concrete bridge from this problem to a student-centred alternative. Rather than treating out-of-school musical knowledge as a deficiency, the review concludes it is a pedagogical and epistemological resource for curriculum design, teacher education, and research. Centring student voice reframes Ghanaian adolescents as legitimate sources of educational knowledge rather than recipients of it, and offers music educators elsewhere a transferable question: whether formal curricula recognise the musical knowledge students already bring.