This article examines Indigenous/non-Indigenous artistic relationships and how artistic collaboration in relationship can inform music education meanings and values. Our collaborative storying explored our individual experiences as Indigenous (Sherryl) and non-Indigenous (Danielle) artists engaged in the Where Waters Meet project with the Canadian Chamber Choir, through analysis of the written score, rehearsal process and performance practice. We ground our analysis in N & ecirc;hiyaw knowledge epistemology. Themes included the teaching 'sing the song until it becomes a part of you' and the Cree concept of t & acirc;pw & ecirc; ('truth').

Teacher preparation for generalist (non-specialist) elementary teachers in Ontario typically comprises one compulsory music class. In entry surveys, many generalists describe themselves as highly apprehensive about and unconfident in their ability to teach music, confirming previous research. Using narrative inquiry, we explore the stories of both preservice and in-service generalist teachers. Data from focus groups with preservice teachers revealed that most participants felt markedly more comfortable with the prospect of teaching music in primary grades after taking our music courses; while fewer expressed confidence in teaching music to junior/intermediate grades. However, preservice teachers are rarely given the chance to observe or teach music while on practicum. Interviews with in-service generalist teachers revealed that a lack of confidence compelled them to take part in intentional, incremental, self-directed learning experiences to further develop their knowledge and skills for the elementary music classroom. The pandemic largely halted music activities, creating new barriers for generalist in-service teachers who teach music. The enduring gaps identified by this research are how to build more opportunities for generalist preservice teachers to practice their newly acquired skills while on practicum; and how to better support generalist in-service teachers to acquire additional skills for teaching music once in the classroom.

Janice Waldron (1957–2022), professor at the University of Windsor (Canada), was an accomplished musician, teacher and researcher. Her scholarly passions revolved around informal music learning practices, online and offline music communities, social media and music learning, and Irish and Scottish traditional musics. In this dedication to Waldron, five friends and colleagues – Kari Veblen, Jonathan Bayley, Kirsten Allstaff, Danielle Sirek and Roger Mantie – offer reflections on her life and work and the legacy she has left for scholars and practitioners of community music.

his issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education engages with themes from the MayDay Group Colloquium 33, Social Media for Good or Evil in Music Learning and Teaching?, which took place in Windsor, Ontario in 2022.The Colloquium explored the MayDay Group Action Ideal related to technology and digital media:We critically examine ways in which humans and technologies interact, and how these interactions contribute to the development and/or destruction of forms of musical knowledge and practice.Technologies evolve within socio-cultural contexts as responses to shifting needs and modes of encounters among humans and their surrounding environments.The use of technologies alters the very ways in which we interact, communicate, and make meaning of our world-transforming individual and collective perceptions of knowledge, truth, and justice.Yet, surrounding the creation, introduction, manipulation, and use of each technological tool is an ideological bias with the potential to induce benefits and harms.Implementation of existing and emergent technologies must be balanced with ongoing critique of the commodification of musics, teaching, and learning; inequitable distribution of and access to technological resources; and concerns about corporate power and overreach.(

This chapter uses the sociological concepts of memory as research and collective memory to explore musicking during the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983. Revisiting data collected during ethnomusicological fieldwork in 2010 and 2011, the chapter finds two distinct understandings of revolutionary musicking revealed in the memories of research informants. Their remembering of music-in-revolution, such as politically motivated reggae and calypso music, suggested the explicit promotion of revolutionary ideology by the government and their supporters through music. However, music-as-revolution, such as participation in mass public singing of revolutionary songs was remembered by participants as active engagement with the revolution itself. The chapter focuses particularly on the experiences of young people in and out of school contexts, as framed within the author’s own memories of listening to remembered stories about the “revo” during her time in Grenada.

Self-portraits are a genre of art, but also constitute artefacts of identity. This research explores student-created musical self-portraits produced by more than 150 generalist teacher education students (preservice teachers) in Ontario, Canada over a period of three years. The self-portraits were completed and submitted as an assignment at the beginning of the term in a compulsory music education class. This paper examines the material practice, influences, and symbols that students used. Most of the selfportraits conformed to the idea of `the good teacher', while only a few represented identities that lay outside social norms. The findings contribute to an understanding of how students may groom their self-image and construct a public identity to fit the institutional and cultural ethos of preservice teacher education programs.

Self-portraits are a genre of art, but also constitute artefacts of identity (Jones 2012; Lent 2007; Ungluab 2004; Iskin 1997). Our research explores musical ’self-portraits’ produced by more than 150 students, submitted as an assignment in a teacher education music class. We mine the self-portraits for floating signifiers of roles and identities whose meaning is dependent on context and on interpreter (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002). Previous research has explored musical identity, and student and teacher identity; but none has used visual methodology (Harper 2016) to explore musical identity of preservice teachers. Most of our students are in their twenties, not so distant from secondary school, where music tastes, dress codes, and body art define groups (Shank 2011). Students who participate in band or choir in school may align their identity with school music in obvious and traditional ways (Salvador 2015). Students who listen to death metal or punk also identify with a community of cultural practice, but one associated with disruption and ’emancipatory aspirations for marginalized or silenced voices’ (Smith, Dines, and Parkinson 2018). In this paper, we examine material practices, codes, and symbols to explore how students self-edit representations of self (Becker 1972); and investigate whether any of the more socially ”deviant” musical tastes or performances of identity are visible. This research is significant to understanding how preservice teachers may groom their self-image to fit the cultural ethos of ”the good teacher;” and to asking, what gets lost when subversive or marginal representations of self are suppressed or self-selected out of our classrooms?

In this article I explore the relationships between identities and musicking in Grenada, West Indies, taking into account the understandings of community and nationhood that foreground and inform identity discourse in the Grenadian context. Through the dual lenses of music education and ethnomusicology, I analyze musicking and music education initiatives intended to rescue Grenadian identity and Grenadian values as articulated by an older generation of Grenadians and by governmental agencies. I argue that musicking in Grenada is intertwined with identity in complex ways, and that there is a perceived lack of transmission of folk musicking practices whose consequences extend well beyond losing musical traditions. This article illuminates conflicts of identity, the deep sense of loss of who we are that has occurred in Grenadian society in recent times, and controversies of music transmission.

This research explores the effects of institutional constraints on instructional practices in a preservice generalist teacher music education program in Ontario, Canada.Using Institutional Ethnography and document analysis of active texts, we, an adjunct and tenured professor, use our own experiences to elucidate the multiple points of control and constraint in which teacher education instructors operate.We examine the ways in which "official" documents, such as course outlines, activate institutional expectations and relations of power, and promote standardization (convergence).We explore factors that influence our curricular choices, pedagogical strategies, and occasional acts of resistance; and how these impact differently tenured and adjunct faculty.The paper includes an introduction to the Action Research project that sparked this inquiry, in which we are investigating generalist teacher confidence and engagement with teaching music in the elementary classroom.

In post-revolution Grenada, explorations of identity often reveal a generational divide.This generational divide is frequently expressed through music (Sirek 2013(Sirek , 2018)).In this qualitative case study I use an ethnographic methodological approach to examine Grenadian calypso and soca music, analyzing data collected from observations and participant observations, interviews, investigation of media/social media; as well as calypso and soca music and lyrics.Drawing from Tönnies' (1887/2017) constructs of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, I explore the ways in which calypso and soca musicking (Small 1998) and music education initiatives construct and articulate the generational divide in Grenada.

Conceived as an ethnographic case study of the relationship between musicking and identities, this thesis examines the relationship between musical practices and experiences in the recent historical past, and in the present day, in Grenada, West Indies. Through the dual lenses of ethnomusicologist and music educator, I examine the impact of musicking – taking Christopher Small’s explication of this term – on the perceptions, constructions, and representations of identity in the Grenadian context, bringing to bear the themes of African ancestry and nationhood, commercialisation, reunderstanding, appropriation, folklorisation, authenticity, and performance. In exploring these themes, I illuminate controversies of the transmission of musicking, conflicts of identity, and the deep sense of loss that has occurred in Grenadian society, specifically through an analysis of calypso music, soca music, Carnival, and presentday musicking initiatives intended to ‘rescue’ Grenadian identity and Grenadian values. I conclude with reflections upon how I might bring these experiences and understandings of Grenadian musicking and its transmission to my own teaching practice and music educational research.