In this article, I address the contemporary discussion of later-life courses in music education research and how it might perpetuate the discrimination and stereotyping of older adults.Drawing from the sociology of aging, I aim to show that one possible way to tackle the ageist assumptions in music education is to reflect on rethinking, re-storying, and reclaiming the master narratives of aging by replacing the dominant linear life span view with an intersectional life course approach.Furthermore, I will present ideas to connect qualitative narrative inquiry with systems thinking, to challenge the practices and research traditions that contribute to the sustainment of stereotypical mental models of aging in music education and move towards a framework of sustainable aging.Finally, the transformative potential of such inquiry will benefit not only music educators interested in later-life questions but also the field at large.The music education of young children, for instance, can be seen as an investment in the musical agency of future older people.
Anchored in the work of Fanon (1952), Mbembe (2019), andSpivak (1988), I take an autoethnographic journey that traces colonization and the subtle forces of coercion that exist in the academy and society, particularly in the US.I draw on Holland et al. (1998) to position myself in a figured world, a unique constellatory network of histories, relationships, geographies, and more.Through this autoethnographic account, I describe my role as a music teacher, one who seeks a transgressive pathway in the fragile territory of a new awareness of diversity that continues to perpetuate subtle epistemic violence.I locate my work as "situated knowledge" within the geographies of marginalization, from the colonized world to prisons.
Teaching for musical meaning can be a multifaceted topic, since a universally accepted definition of musical meaning is elusive; yet musical meaning remains at the heart of music literacy.Music literacy is equally complex, as changes in technology constantly reorganize how musical sounds are produced, recorded, and transmitted.Today, musical texts are presented through increasingly diverse, multi-modal forms, and changes in media bring accompanying changes to how we construct musical meaning.In this article, I consider parallels between language and music as they are transmitted through evolving texts and interpreted by a reader to create syntactical, prosodic, and social meaning.These three meaning domains are examined within print and oral cultural ways of knowing since both are present in the current media landscape.Considering notation as a form of externalized cognition, I advance a new music literacy theory that reclaims orality as necessary for active participation in the various music discourses in contemporary society.In the proposed model, students discover musical meaning as they make decisions and formulate beliefs related to musical organization (syntax) and expression (prosody) in relation to a community.
In this article, three researchers and music teacher educators reflect upon the possibilities for and challenges of fostering preservice teachers' critical and democratic capacities and agency in music teacher education in line with recent 21st-century skillsoriented policy reforms.Based on experiences from participatory action research with preservice music teachers in general teacher education at two Norwegian institutions, the authors problematise how critical reflection is defined in educational literature, in policy documents, and by students participating in the referred participatory action research.The authors further discuss the different understandings of critical reflection, considering concepts such as student-centredness, students as customers, student resistance, and student voice.Inspired by critical pedagogy, the authors suggest that the preservice teachers' articulated reflections represent important steps in their progress toward becoming professional music teachers and that enduring the discomfort of loosening up the student-teacher dyad benefits the development of students' agency and critical reflection.
In this article, I explore how popular music became incorporated into the field of music education in the 21st-century United States.In doing so, I suspend notions of popular music education as simply inclusive or able to produce creative people.Instead, I question how inclusion becomes constructed and defined historically in relation to ideas such as the need for creative people and the possibilities and purposes of popular music education.To pursue such understandings, the analysis focuses primarily on the Tanglewood Symposium as a site of production.I examine the documentary report of the symposium in order to question the intersecting multiple historical trajectories and modes of thought that construct popular music education at Tanglewood.Following this, I consider how these histories have left significant impacts on the epistemologies and practices of contemporary popular music education.In the process, I draw attention to the ways in which notions of desired (and not desired) kinds of people become constructed, how inclusions and interventions become administered in response, and how such ideas become constructed through modes of thought that have little to do with music or popular music practice yet serve to produce popular music education.
The main purpose of this article is to affirm that music educators have agency to foster collaborations with local culture bearers, particularly in contexts where a strong influence of music with Indigenous roots exists.This can be done in Mexico, despite the lack of Indigenous perspectives in the nation's national curriculum.Music educators have the freedom at the local level to decentre the idea that knowledge connected to Indigenous cultures is less valuable than forms of knowledge associated with a Western-European paradigm.In order to demonstrate the importance of embracing Indigenous perspectives via music in Mexico's educational system, I provide narratives of Huasteco Culture Bearers (HCBs).The HCBs interviewed reflect on their personal journeys as they have personally experienced the undermining of their ways of knowing and being by people working in the educational system; at the same time, the HCBs share their interest in seeking meaningful collaborations with music educators in order that students can learn and engage with their own local cultures via music making in schools going forward.
Over its twenty-one years, ACT has been a leading voice in music education when new areas of scholarship have emerged. As ACT’s co-editors for the past five years, we are proud of what the journal represents and its continued growth. Despite suspicion and disparagement in the early 2000s from mainstream print journals and university tenure and promotion committees uncertain of its status or scholarly rigor, possibly stemming from the journal’s critical orientation, ACT has become a highly respected publication. Its articles and issues are now widely read and frequently cited, and it has even played a role in pioneering online access for other academic journals in music education. The MayDay Group can point to ACT as tangible evidence of its influence on the thinking of music educators worldwide. This issue, compiled from both regular submissions and those written in response to calls for ACT special issues, exemplifies the breadth of scholarship and the diversity of important issues that have found a place in the journal.
This article conceptualizes and discusses change in music teacher education.Results from the FUTURED research project provide the starting point for the article.The project explored various dimensions of change within the music education programs in Norwegian generalist teacher education.In this project, change was regarded as having a transformative capacity closely related to co-construction and complexity.Telling new stories about education, and thereby imagining different educational realities, may be seen as a possible trigger for change.In this article, therefore, the authors contrast the current situation against an imagined reality to create a heuristic framework for a critical discussion of change.Based on a meta-analysis of research findings, the authors propose a vision for a future music teacher education, which they then use to highlight and discuss several intersecting dimensions of educational change: values and traditions, demographics, educa-
Based on interviews with fourteen Finnish women classical music students and graduates from Finnish higher music education institutions, this article sheds light on the under-researched subject of emotional abuse in classical music education.Emotional abuse is defined as patterned deliberate non-contact behavior, such as verbal abuse and emotional neglect (Stirling and Kerr 2008).In this research, such behavior included maleficent and/or demeaning comments; unwarranted anger; humiliation; harmful comparison; denial of approval, attention, or support; and intentionally setting up a student for failure.First, I ask in what ways beliefs and values specific to classical music culture partly allow for emotional abuse.Second, I explore how the understandings and theories of Gatens (1996Gatens ( /2003) ) and Tännsjö (2000) can be applied to explain how beliefs, representations, images, symbols, and narratives specific to classical music culture allow for the prevalence of emotional abuse by impacting norms of behavior that may leave individuals prone to both participating in and accepting emotionally abusive behavior.
The college admissions process (application, audition, acceptance) serves as a crucial milestone for many aspiring music educators.It also functions as a barrier to accessing the profession for historically marginalized students.In this article, we employ anti-racism as a lens to critically examine the admissions process as it exists in many music education programs.Incorporating this with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) theorization of the state and the war machine, we consider ways to disrupt the seemingly iron-clad system of music education collegiate admissions and advocate for changes that benefit marginalized students and the music education profession.
In this paper the author uses creative non-fiction to story a formative life event in a reflection on how music learning was critical to her survival, self-repair and self-making.The paper centres on relationship, adolescent trauma, and critical loss, and how physical and ethereal spaces of healing can be found in the music room and in music learning and making.The potential for literary forms of scholarly inquiry to connect the personal experiences of both writer and reader is explored, as deeply rooted memories invoke selfcompassion, and deepen empathy and awareness amongst music educators, teachers, and in the scholarship of music learning and making.
This paper discusses the implementation of a university teaching module, based on Lucy Green's (2008) informal music learning model.The synergy between Green's model and Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy is addressed through explanation of the module and its practices.The module was offered six times, from 2011 to 2016, as an action research project on a mixed-mode distance education undergraduate music program at the Open University of Brazil.The choices of technology in the module were aimed at promoting interactions in a dialogical, humanizing, and problem-posing approach to education in order to achieve conscientization (Freire 1970).However, the uses of technology and some of the practices of students led the author to ponder discourses of technological determinism.
This article offers a critique of the concept of artistic citizenship, focusing on citizenship as it relates to the institutions of state and nationhood.I explore the tensions between metaphorical concepts of citizenship employed in the work of various authors (Campbell and Martin 2006;Downey 2014;Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman 2016), and citizenship as the institution related to state/nationhood (Brandzel 2016) with its potential for negative normativity.Questions emerging from this exploration focus on what the terminology of artistic citizenship might mean for those vulnerable to the machinations of the state, those without citizenship such as the "Dreamers," or those who are stateless.
What does it mean to experience disability in music? Based on interviews with PatrickAnderson-arguably the greatest wheelchair basketball player of all time-this article presents insights into the complexities of the experience of disability in sports and music.Contrasted with music education's tendency to adhere to a medicalized model of disability, Anderson's nuanced views on disability in different contexts serves as an accessible point of entry to literature in the field of Disability Studies.Using Anderson's anecdotal experiences of disability in sports and music as catalysts, key concepts in Disability Studies are discussed including the medical and social models of disability, conventions of disability terminology, disability identity, and the relevance of Lubet's (2010) contextual model of disability-social confluence-to the field of music education.
This article explores four reasons for devoting a review issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education to Randall Allsup's Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education.First, Allsup seems to recognize the social, cultural, and somatic situatedness of his own thinking, a materialist and constructionist stance consistent with ACT's focus in critical social theory.Second, Allsup's approach further complements the ideals of the MayDay Group.Third, Allsup directly challenges praxial philosophies of music education that have been and continue to be foundational in ACT and the MayDay Group-a challenge that calls for a response.Finally, in his dialectical struggle between open and closed forms, Allsup foregrounds openness and rupture, a necessity in efforts for emancipatory change music education.
There is an emerging shortage of those responsible for training music teachers in the United States. Asmus (2001) characterized such a shortage as the “new challenge…befalling music education” (p. 3). When prognosticating the resultant effect on K-12 education, he warned that this shortage is “the single biggest threat to the health of music in our nation’s schools” (p. 4). Since 1998, there has been a notable decline in the number of doctoral degrees granted in music education. From a high of 101 in 1998, the number of music education doctoral degrees granted at NASM-accredited institutions has dropped to 88 in 1999, and 76 in 2001 (HEADS, 1999, 2000, 2002). The situation has been exacerbated further by an increasing demand for college positions in music education over the past twenty years. In 1980, music education vacancies were 6.50% of the total number of vacancies in all areas of music in higher education. By 2000, music education vacancies rose to be 10.66% of the total. Over the same twenty-year time period, vacancies in the broad areas of studio instruction, ensemble instruction, and academic instruction fell, while those in music education rose substantially (Hickey, 2002).
The purpose of this study is to analyze how the music educational program of ElSistema Sweden is advertised and legitimized through moving images. The filmsare a major part of the information on th ...
