Roots to Routes: Music Identity and the Making of an Educator

What if the educator we become is shaped not only by what we teach, but by the worlds that have shaped us? What do we carry into the classroom without even realising it?
This personal, story-led reflection explores how my lifelong engagement with Indian classical music, grounded in the guru–shishya parampara and shaped by listening, practice,
improvisation, discipline and relationality, has influenced how I teach, research and inhabit my educator self. Music is not the subject I teach, yet it is deeply woven into how I approach
teaching and learning. It has become a form of cultural capital that travels with me, influencing how I listen to students and colleagues, attend to silence, respond to difference,
create space for improvisation, and understand learning as relational, situated and evolving.
It has also informed my research interests in identity, culture, belonging, positionality and how different forms of knowledge and experience are recognised in higher education.
Through this journey from roots to routes, I invite colleagues to reflect on the cultural histories, embodied practices and identities they bring into their professional lives, and how these influence not only what they do, but how they do it, whom they encounter, and who they become along the way. Music will thread through the storytelling, with moments of live demonstration serving as pauses, transitions and ways of making meaning.

Dr Nira Rahman is an academic and researcher at the University of Melbourne exploring identity, equity, and inclusive partnership-driven pedagogy in higher education. A musician and published author, she writes for international media on culture, language and identity, weaving together academic inquiry, creative expression and personal insight.

Her latest book:

Student-Staff Partnerships in Higher Education: Inclusivity, Power Dynamics and Challenges

by Nira Rahman, Callum Reid, et al. | 3 April 2026