Discourses of diversity in music education: The curriculum framework of the Norwegian Schools of Music and Performing Arts as a case

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Live Weider Ellefsen ◽  
Sidsel Karlsen
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
The Social ◽  
Curriculum Framework ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Schools Of Music

In this article, we enquire into the language of diversity as it is currently in use in the field of music education, by way of exploring the social and educational ambitions of the Norwegian system of extra-curricular, Schools of Music and Performing Arts. We take as our case the recently launched governing document of this particular educational system, named Curriculum framework for schools of music and performing arts: Diversity and deeper understanding. Analysing this document as a discursive statement, and through a Foucauldian theoretical lens, we investigate the meanings of “diversity” enacted within and across the various textual-discursive contexts of the curriculum framework, identifying and exploring four nodal points of signification, namely: 1) diversity understood as difference in students’ ethno-cultural backgrounds; 2) diversity of educational opportunities and modes of expression; 3) diversity and/or/as deeper understanding; and 4) diversity of learning arenas and contexts: entrepreneurial expectations. The discussion of the findings is conducted in dialogue with a historical understanding of the Norwegian Schools of Music and Performing Arts’ societal mandate and approach to diversity as well as various understandings of diversity within the international field of music education research. We conclude by pointing out that the macro-level institutional strategy and aim of emphasising and encouraging diversity cannot be understood as fulfilled before it has been sufficiently operationalised and has trickled down into the everyday actions of teachers and students. Only then is it implemented as a tool accessible on the micro-level and with the potential to enhance students’ participation and agency.

A Right to Education for All: The Meaning of Equal Educational Opportunities

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Hemelsoet
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Right To Education ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Irregular Migrants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Equal Educational Opportunities

The debate on the social function of schooling is as old as the idea of schooling itself. In those discussions, the concept of equal opportunities is often referred to as a means or a strategy to pursue social equality. This article discusses four conceptions of equality, each referring to different notions of justice. In meritocratic, distributive and social equality of opportunities, the conceptualisation of equality is deduced from a particular societal order. The subject-oriented equality position, as an alternative, focuses on the consequences of these approaches at an individual level. A closer look at the everyday social practices of minority groups (in this case irregular migrants), is very useful in order to gain insight into these consequences. Are equal opportunities as a conceptual tool for educational policy making helpful to realise the ‘universal right to education’ that we are willing to offer to all? Conclusions will be drawn on how this universal right can be turned from merely a legal provision into a vivid practice in an educationally more promising way.

Addressing the NASM Health and Safety Standard through Curricular Changes in a Brass Methods Course: An Outcome Study

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 136-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Laursen ◽  
Kris Chesky
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Health Risks ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Methods Course ◽  
Safety Standard ◽  
Methods Courses ◽  
Performing Arts Medicine ◽  
Course Objectives ◽  
Schools Of Music

The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) recently ratified a new health and safety standard requiring schools of music to inform students about health concerns related to music. While organizations such as the Performing Arts Medicine Association have developed advisories, the exact implementation is the prerogative of the institution. One possible approach is to embed health education activities into existing methods courses that are routinely offered to music education majors. This may influence student awareness, knowledge, and the perception of competency and responsibility for addressing health risks associated with learning and performing musical instruments. Unfortunately, there are no known lesson plans or curriculum guides for supporting such activities. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to (1) develop course objectives and content that can be applied to a preexisting brass methods course, (2) implement course objectives into a semester-long brass methods course, and (3) test the effectiveness of this intervention on students’ awareness, knowledge, perception of competency, and responsibly of health risks that are related to learning and performing brass instruments. Results showcase the potential for modifying methods courses without compromising the other objectives of the course. Additionally, students’ awareness, knowledge, perception of competency, and responsibility were positively influenced as measured by changes in pre to post responses to survey group questions.

Critical Reflection for Social Justice and Inclusion in Music Education

2015 ◽  
pp. 524-538
Author(s):  
Carolyn Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Music Classroom ◽  
Conditions For Learning ◽  
Reflection Model ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Musical Understanding

This chapter explores the potential of critical reflection as a tool for addressing issues of social justice and inclusion within the music classroom. It argues that critical reflection as an integral part of musical experiences can be utilized to develop awareness of injust and exclusionary practices in music, whether political, historical, or social. Drawing on the Social Justice Critical Reflection Model of Ingram and Walters, it offers a starting point for considering the conditions for learning and pedagogies in which critical reflection can provide teachers and students a vehicle for transforming their own musical understanding and learning within a more democratic and socially just framework.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

Creating Multiple Sites of Engagement for Music Learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Jonathan Savage
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
The Core ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Meaningful Relationships ◽  
Mindful Teaching ◽  
Specific Technology

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.

New Materiality and Young People’s Connectedness Across Online and Offline Life Spaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 487-502
Author(s):  
Susan O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Educational Outcome ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Learning ◽  
Musical Resources ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
Digital Cultures

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.

Creating Virtual Ensembles: Common Approaches from Research and Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-46
Author(s):  
Christopher Cayari
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Music Teachers ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Online Music ◽  
Education Courses

A virtual ensemble is a digital musical product that uses multiple recordings edited together to form a musical ensemble. Creating virtual ensembles can be a way for music educators to engage students through online music-making. This article presents eight steps for creating virtual ensembles in music education courses and classrooms. The steps are (1) identifying objectives and desired outcomes, (2) selecting repertoire, (3) developing learning resources, (4) creating an anchor for synchronizing, (5) choosing a recording method, (6) setting up a collection platform, (7) editing in postproduction, and (8) distributing the product. As online music production becomes more prevalent, projects like virtual ensembles can provide creative and exciting experiences for music teachers and students, whether produced in the classroom or through remote means on the Internet.

scholarly journals A Predictive Model Assessing Genetic Susceptibility Risk at Workplace

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiarella ◽  
Capone ◽  
Carbonari ◽  
Sisto
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Genotype Frequency ◽  
Individual Heterogeneity ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Host Countries ◽  
Polymorphic Genes ◽  
Safety And Health ◽  
The Social

(1) Background: The study of susceptibility biomarkers in the immigrant workforce integrated into the social tissue of European host countries is always a challenge, due to high individual heterogeneity and the admixing of different ethnicities in the same workplace. These workers having distinct cultural backgrounds, beliefs, diets, and habits, as well as a poor knowledge of the foreign language, may feel reluctant to donate their biological specimens for the biomonitoring research studies. (2) Methods: A model predicting ethnicity-specific susceptibility based on principal component analysis has been conceived, using the genotype frequency of the investigated populations available in publicly accessible databases. (3) Results: Correlations among ethnicities and between ethnic and polymorphic genes have been found, and low/high-risk profiles have been identified as valuable susceptibility biomarkers. (4) Conclusions: In the absence of workers’ consent or access to blood genotyping, ethnicity represents a good indicator of the subject’s genotype. This model, associating ethnicity-specific genotype frequency with the susceptibility biomarkers involved in the metabolism of toxicants, may replace genotyping, ensuring the necessary safety and health conditions of workers assigned to hazardous jobs.

scholarly journals An exploratory study of the ways in which mothers keep their infants occupied

Curationis ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Botha ◽  
G. Cleaver
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
First Year ◽  
Development Research ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Infant Research ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
Mother Child Relationship

The mother child relationship can help or hinder the social, emotional and intellectual development of the infant. Research has shown that the interaction between mother and child can affect the child’s cognitive development. Research has shown that mothers from the lower socio-economic groups do not stimulate their babies optimally and that this may affect the children negatively. In this study 86 underprivileged mothers from two different cultural backgrounds were asked to describe the ways in which they kept their infants occupied during the first year of their infants’ lives. The differences between the two groups are discussed and recommendations are made.

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