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.
