The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning

The rapid pace of technological change over the last decade, particularly in relation to social media and network connectivity, has deeply affected the ways in which individuals, groups, and institutions interact socially: This includes how music is made, learned, and taught globally in all manner of diverse contexts. The multiple ways in which social media and social networking intersect with the everyday life of the musical learner are at the heart of this book. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning opens up an international discussion of what it means to be a music learner, teacher, producer, consumer, individual, and community member in an age of technologically-mediated relationships that continue to break down the limits of geographical, cultural, political, and economic place. This book is aimed at those who teach and train music educators as well as current and future music educators. Its primary goal is to draw attention to the ways in which social media, musical participation, and musical learning are increasingly entwined by examining questions, issues, concerns, and potentials this raises for formal, informal, and non-formal musical learning and engagement in a networked society. It provides an international perspective on a variety of related issues from scholars who are leaders in the field of music education, new media, communications, and sociology in the emerging field of social media.

Author(s):  
Janice L. Waldron ◽  
Stephanie Horsley ◽  
Kari K. Veblen

The rapid development of social media reflects both technologies and a field of scholarship that are constantly in flux. However, as boyd (2014) explains, although “the spaces may change, the organizing principles aren’t different” (p. 4). The chapters in this book explore theory, research, and practice in social media, along with the resulting implications for both how people think about social media and the practical applications for music learning and teaching. This includes informing and lowering boundaries between formal and informal music education practices in a digitally networked society. Social media and social networking in the 21st century have quickly changed the landscape of music learning and will continue to do so.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Savage

Music education exists in multiple spaces. Within formal approaches to music education in academic institutions, there has been an acknowledgment that more informal pedagogical approaches can be useful (as evidenced in the work of movements such as Musical Futures). However, constructive links between formal and informal contexts for music education remain difficult to navigate for many teachers. Within the United Kingdom, the newly defined roles for music education hubs have made some headway in recasting these relationships in a more productive direction. Similarly, social media has an important role to play in developing new relationships between key agencies within music education. Like any specific technology, there are positive affordances and more negative limitations to such approaches. People have a complex relationship with technology, but they are not gadgets! Lanier’s (2010) thesis argues strongly that recent cultural developments can deaden personal interaction, stifle genuine inventiveness, and change people. Within an educational setting, careful consideration needs to be given to the affordances and limitations of social media. For teachers and designers of learning spaces and opportunities, pedagogy should be underpinned by careful, mindful choices—including wise choices about the tools that teachers and students are using. It is about a focus on the core, asking: What is the key learning that this music lesson is facilitating? Is this tool the best one for the job? Does this tool or approach allow one to teach music musically? Done skillfully and conscientiously, social media can help develop collaborative approaches to music education that provide teachers with pedagogical strength and security. They result in mindful teaching and mindful learning that will last a lifetime. They can also help teachers develop meaningful relationships with students that help them make sense of their musical experiences in whatever context they have emerged through: a truly, “joined-up” approach to music education with the student at the core.


Author(s):  
Evan S. Tobias

Contemporary society is rich with diverse musics and musical practices, many of which are supported or shared via digital and social media. Music educators might address such forms of musical engagement to diversify what occurs in music programs. Realizing the possibilities of social media and addressing issues that might be problematic for music learning and teaching calls for conceptualizing social media in a more expansive manner than focusing on the technology itself. Situating people’s social media use and musical engagement in a larger context of participatory culture that involves music and media may be fruitful in this regard. We might then consider the potential of social media and musical engagement in participatory cultures for music learning and teaching. This chapter offers an overview of how people are applying aspects of participatory culture and social media in educational contexts. Building on work in media studies, media arts, education, and curricular theory, the chapter develops a framework for translating and recontextualizing participatory culture, musical engagement, and social media in ways that might inform music pedagogy and curriculum. In this way, it may help music educators move from an awareness of how people engage with and through music and social media in participatory culture to an orientation of developing related praxis.


Author(s):  
Susan O’Neill

This chapter examines new materiality perspectives to explore the influence of social media on young people’s music learning lives—their sense of identity, community and connection as they engage in and through music across online and offline life spaces. The aim is to provide an interface between activity, materiality, networks, human agency, and the construction of identities within the social media contexts that render young people’s music learning experiences meaningful. The chapter also emphasizes what nomadic pedagogy looks like at a time of transcultural cosmopolitanism and the positioning of youth-as-musical-resources who “make up” new musical opportunities collaboratively with people/materials/time/space. This involves moving beyond the notion of music learning as an educational outcome to embrace, instead, a nomadic pedagogical framework that values and supports the process of young people deciphering and making meaningful connections with the world around them. It is hoped that implications stemming from this discussion will provide insights for researchers, educators, and policymakers with interests in innovative pedagogical approaches and the creation of new learning and digital cultures in music education.


Author(s):  
Alice M. Hammel ◽  
Ryan M. Hourigan

Music students with autism are frequently placed in music learning environments not conducive to their needs. Music educators must advocate for the most appropriate learning environment for their students. This chapter focuses on establishing relationships with parents, special educators, special education administrators, and classroom teachers to advocate for the most appropriate learning environment. In addition, this chapter focuses on understanding the necessary components of the musical learning environment for students with ASD and reaching out to community organizations for educational support.


2020 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-50
Author(s):  
Michael S. Zelenak

Albert Bandura identified self-efficacy as the dominant self-perception shaping action, effort, and achievement. In music education, researchers have identified a positive relationship between self-efficacy and achievement, but how can music educators develop self-efficacy to improve achievement? This article offers a description of self-efficacy and provides practical strategies to promote its development in music education. These strategies can be applied in any music learning environment so that music educators may be more fully prepared to integrate activities that build self-efficacy into their instruction, enabling their students to reach higher levels of achievement.


Author(s):  
Clint Randles

The proliferation of the use of new media and creativities are expanding the ways that humans engage creatively with music in the twenty-first century. As teachers and researchers, our methods of assessing these creativities need to expand as well. In this chapter the author points to some of the ways that music education has traditionally conceived of both creativity and the measurement of compositional activity in the classroom. However, it should be clear that formative, summative, feedback, diagnostic, and evaluative assessment are all necessary and vital to understanding and justifying the place of composition learning in music education, and that we as a profession have not done an adequate job of it in the past. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, Finland, and Australia, have done a better job of creating curricular space for composition than the United States. The rest of the world can learn from these successes.


Author(s):  
Deanna C. C. Peluso

A continual ebb and flow of technological progressions provide diverse contexts in which music learning, participation, and education can occur. Youth are deeply immersed within a culture of globalized and multimodal knowledge-sharing, through which music learning occurs within formal, nonformal, and informal contexts, both in the physical and online worlds. These interconnected environments provide learners with a diverse collection of tools and resources that enable them to take charge of their own musical learning. Further, they can connect and share with other learners, educators, and experts through their own digitally mediated personal learning networks (PLNs). In these PLNs, extensive repertoires of formal music education combined with informal music learning practices that provide self-directed forums for musical experiences can enable music learners to flourish and adapt to globalized and diverse contexts. Learners cultivate, in their own personally relevant ways, networks of musical knowledge by drawing on the resources and tools available both on- and offline. By examining PLNs supported by multimodal social media resources as well as online forums for sharing and exploring music knowledge, this chapter presents practical examples and applications to inform music educators and classroom practices.


This handbook seeks to present a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of social justice in music education. Contributors from around the world interrogate the complex, multidimensional, and often contested nature of social justice and music education from a variety of philosophical, political, social, and cultural perspectives. Although many chapters take as their starting point an analysis of how dominant political, educational, and musical ideologies serve to construct and sustain inequities and undemocratic practices, authors also identify practices that seek to promote socially just pedagogy and approaches to music education. These range from those taking place in formal and informal music education contexts, including schools and community settings, to music projects undertaken in sites of repression and conflict, such as prisons, refugee camps, and areas of acute social disadvantage or political oppression. In a volume of this scope, there are inevitably many recurring themes. However, common to many of those music education practices that seek to create more democratic and equitable spaces for musical learning is a belief in the centrality of student agency and a commitment to the too-often silenced voice of the learner. To that end, this Handbook challenges music educators to reflect critically on their own beliefs and pedagogical practices so that they may contribute more effectively to the creation and maintenance of music learning environs and programs in which matters of access and equity are continually brought to the fore.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-52
Author(s):  
William J. Coppola

In this paper, I critique the ways in which music education professionals—especially the privileged voices within our field—engage in dialogue through social media outlets such as Facebook. While social media has become a valuable and ubiquitous discursive tool within our field, especially in that it theoretically removes the “ivory tower” of dialogue in academia, here I critique its darker side. Were he alive today, I question how philosopher Paulo Freire would respond to the dialogical opportunities afforded by social media and the emergence of “woke culture.” Particularly when engaging in the work of antiracism, I highlight how privileged music educators can silence any dialogue through their hostility or fragility alike through various forms of call-out culture, cancel culture, virtue signaling, and tone policing. I draw upon the full corpus of Freire’s works to examine the overall veracity of these approaches to antiracist efforts and offer that Freire’s pedagogy was interminably rooted in humility, love, and the pursuit of shared humanity.


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