On the Nature of Knowledge: What We Want and What we Get With Measurement in Music Education

2003 ◽  
Vol os-40 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Aróstegui

This paper is a philosophical argument about the possibility – or lack thereof – of truly evaluating music learning. The starting point is that the nature of knowledge conditions all assessment. For this reason, the first section is dedicated to discussion of the two global types of knowledge, positivist and interpretive. In the second section, these two kinds of knowledge to the different concepts of classical music are related. This is followed by discussion on how these two types of knowledge affect music education. Finally, conclusions state that positivist and interpretive knowledge are complementary. Instruction and assessment must be done according to the different circumstances of the instructional process, whereby a student interacts with his or her realm, using both the positivist and the interpretive.

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 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Alexandra Belibou

"Using technology in a creative-based approach to music learning is beneficial when we refer to the development of creativity as the finality of artistic musical education. In its permanent movement, we notice that the educational process progressively removes everything that becomes dysfunctional outdated. Therefore, both through the act of teaching learning and through the act of evaluation, as the blockages of any nature that stand in the way of creativity are discovered, they can be diminished. This article proposes musical activities that use Reaper software, which provides a good environment for grooming students with aesthetic sensibilities that should always accompany technical knowledge. Moreover, this article serves as a starting point for teachers hoping to develop creativity through music software. Keywords: Reaper, software, creativity, music education. "


Per Musi ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Nan Qi ◽  
Durval Cesetti

This article uses the story of a Chinese immigrant in Brazil and his love of música sertaneja as a starting point to discuss his adaptation to a new society and the way in which his music learning played an important role in this process. Anchored in the ideals of Narrative Inquiry and inspired by Mezirow's Transformative Learning Theory, the article then extrapolates from this unique story to present a broad discussion that includes ideas about music education, immigration, identity, individual and social transformation, empowerment, and self-definition. The article concludes with reflections about the importance of music learning to the adaptation of immigrants in general, an idea that has wide applicability, being useful both for immigrants themselves, as well as for teachers and policymakers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wai-Chung Ho

This study examined popular music and school music education as cultural constructs of teenage students amid the shifting cultural and social dynamics of contemporary China. Data were drawn from questionnaires completed by 6,780 secondary students (mainly ages 12 through 17) from three cities—Beijing, Changsha, and Shanghai. The survey results revealed the extent of Chinese youths’ preferences for a variety of popular music styles in their daily lives, the relationship between their preference for popular idols and their music learning, and their views on learning popular music in school music education. The discussion in this article focuses on the dynamics of teaching popular music and learning other music styles (not limited to either popular or classical music) within the school environment in relation to teenage students’ daily music experiences and school music learning, school music teachers, and teacher education in contemporary China.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 220
Author(s):  
Koopal ◽  
Vlieghe ◽  
de Baets

Author(s):  
Anna Bull

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working-class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read from classical music’s practices. Finally, its aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long-term investment that is more possible, and makes more sense, for middle- and upper-class families. Through these arguments, the book reframes existing debates on gender and classical music participation in light of the classed gender identities that the study revealed. Overall, the book suggests that inequalities in cultural production can be understood through examining the practices that are used to create a particular aesthetic. It argues that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. It describes how the aesthetic of classical music is a mechanism through which the middle classes carry out boundary-drawing around their protected spaces, and within these spaces, young people’s participation in classical music education cultivates a socially valued form of self-hood.


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):  
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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 030573562199123
Author(s):  
Simon Schaerlaeken ◽  
Donald Glowinski ◽  
Didier Grandjean

Musical meaning is often described in terms of emotions and metaphors. While many theories encapsulate one or the other, very little empirical data is available to test a possible link between the two. In this article, we examined the metaphorical and emotional contents of Western classical music using the answers of 162 participants. We calculated generalized linear mixed-effects models, correlations, and multidimensional scaling to connect emotions and metaphors. It resulted in each metaphor being associated with different specific emotions, subjective levels of entrainment, and acoustic and perceptual characteristics. How these constructs relate to one another could be based on the embodied knowledge and the perception of movement in space. For instance, metaphors that rely on movement are related to emotions associated with movement. In addition, measures in this study could also be represented by underlying dimensions such as valence and arousal. Musical writing and music education could benefit greatly from these results. Finally, we suggest that music researchers consider musical metaphors in their work as we provide an empirical method for it.


Author(s):  
Matthew D. Thibeault

In this article, I explore John Philip Sousa’s historic resistance to music technology and his belief that sound recordings would negatively impact music education and musical amateurism. I review Sousa’s primary arguments from two 1906 essays and his testimony to the US Congress from the same year, based on the fundamental premise that machines themselves sing or perform, severing the connection between live listener and performer and thus rendering recordings a poor substitute for real music. Sousa coined the phrase “canned music,” and I track engagement with this phrase among the hundreds of newspapers and magazines focused on Sousa’s resistance. To better understand the construction of Sousa’s beliefs, I then review how his rich musical upbringing around the US Marine Band and the theaters of Washington DC lead to his conception of music as a dramatic ritual. And I examine the curious coda of Sousa’s life, during which he recanted his beliefs and conducted his band for radio, finding that in fact these experiences reinforced Sousa’s worries. The discussion considers how Sousa’s ideas can help us better to examine the contemporary shift to digital music by combining Sousa’s ideas with those of Sherry Turkle.


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