Scholarship in music education has extensively highlighted ways in which pedagogical approaches rooted in Western European paradigms inadequately serve today’s culturally diverse student populations (Abramo & Austin, 2014; Fleischaker, 2021; Heuser, 2015; Sherard, 2023; Veblen & Beynon, 2003). Much of this work, however, has focused on pre-service or early-career teachers, with less attention to veteran educators and the challenges faced within later stages of their teaching career. These teachers often hold long-established pedagogical routines and work within generational and cultural gaps between their training and the lived musical experiences of their students. For veteran teachers who undertake a shift in pedagogy, their stories provide an important yet underexplored perspective on how professional identity, reflection, and responsiveness evolve across a career.This study employs a narrative inquiry approach to explore the pedagogical transformations of several late-career elementary music educators in Canada, each represented through an individual, co-constructed narrative. Framed by Mezirow’s (1978, 1991) theory of transformative learning, and informed by scholarship on centering students’ musical lifeworlds (Campbell, 2010; Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2017; Roberts, 2024; Leddy & Miller, 2024), this inquiry explores the roles reflexivity and critical discourse play in highlighting the challenges and benefits of a shift in pedagogical practice. Through a series of community of inquiry meetings and follow-up individual interviews, participants in this study were invited to narrate moments of pedagogical dissonance, critical reflection, and renewal. Using a variation of the River of Experience critical charting technique (Burnard, 2012; Denicolo & Pope, 1990; Pope & Denicolo, 1993), participants discussed the metaphorical currents, impediments, and riverbanks that have shaped their teaching careers, providing visual and narrative entry points into their transformative processes.Initial findings indicated that the impetus for pedagogical change stemmed from personal, internal experiences or from the external influence of a teaching peer or mentor. Of particular note were the experiences of teachers in the study who drew on Indigenous ways of knowing and learning, implementing land-based pedagogies that reflected their personal processes of reclaiming heritage.By bringing forward the narratives of veteran elementary music teachers within the theoretical frame of transformative learning, this research contributes to ongoing conversations about lifelong teacher development and the sustainability of reflective practice. It foregrounds the seldom-heard voices of long-tenured educators navigating change amid evolving cultural and institutional landscapes, offering insight into how personal history, professional identity, and student-centred pedagogy intersect in the late-career music classroom.