Education Music And The Lives Of Undergraduates

The undergraduate years are a special time of life for many students. They are a time for study, yes, but also a time for making independent decisions over what to do beyond formal education. This book is based on a nine-year study of collegiate a cappella - a socio-musical practice that has exploded on college campuses since the 1990s. A defining feature of collegiate a cappella is that it is a student-run leisure activity undertaken by undergraduate students at institutions both large and small, prestigious and lower-status. With rare exceptions, participants are not music majors yet many participants interviewed had previous musical experience both in and out of school settings. Motivations for staying musically involved varied considerably - from those who felt they could not imagine life without a musical outlet to those who joined on a whim. Collegiate a cappella is about much more than singing cover songs. It sustains multiple forms of inequality through its audition practices and its performative enactment of gender and heteronormativity. This book sheds light on how undergraduates conceptualize vocation and avocation within the context of formal education, holding implications for educators at all levels.

The undergraduate years are a special time of life for many students. They are a time for study, yes, but also a time for making independent decisions over what to do beyond formal education. This book is based on a nine-year study of collegiate a cappella - a socio-musical practice that has exploded on college campuses since the 1990s. A defining feature of collegiate a cappella is that it is a student-run leisure activity undertaken by undergraduate students at institutions both large and small, prestigious and lower-status. With rare exceptions, participants are not music majors yet many participants interviewed had previous musical experience both in and out of school settings. Motivations for staying musically involved varied considerably - from those who felt they could not imagine life without a musical outlet to those who joined on a whim. Collegiate a cappella is about much more than singing cover songs. It sustains multiple forms of inequality through its audition practices and its performative enactment of gender and heteronormativity. This book sheds light on how undergraduates conceptualize vocation and avocation within the context of formal education, holding implications for educators at all levels.

This book explores historical and philosophical connections between music, leisure, and education. Specifically, it considers how music learning, teaching, and participation can be reconceptualized in terms of leisure. Taking as its starting point the art of living and the ethical question of how one should live, the book engages a wide range of scholarship to problematize the place of non-professional music-making in historical and contemporary (Western) conceptions of the good life and the common good. Part I provides a general background on music education, school music, the work ethic, leisure studies, recreation, play, and conduct. Part II focuses on two significant currents of thought and activity during the Progressive Era in the United States, the settlement movement and the recreation movement. The examination demonstrates how societal concerns over conduct (the threat of leisure) and differing views on the purpose of music learning and teaching led to a fracturing between those espousing generalist and specialist positions. The four chapters of Part III take readers through considerations of happiness (eudaimonia) and the good life, issues of work-life balance and the play spirit, leisure satisfaction in relation to consumerism, individualism, and the common good, and finally, parenting logics in relation to extracurriculars, music learning, and serious leisure.

Undergraduate Research in Music: A Guide for Students supplies tools for scaffolding research skills, with examples of undergraduate research activities and case studies on projects in the various areas of music study. Undergraduate research has become a common degree requirement in some disciplines and is growing rapidly. Many undergraduate activities in music have components that could be combined into compelling undergraduate research projects, either in the required curriculum, as part of existing courses, or in capstone courses centered on undergraduate research. The book begins with an overview chapter, followed by the seven chapters on research skills, including literature reviews, choosing topics, formulating questions, citing sources, disseminating results, and working with data and human subjects. A wide variety of musical subdisciplines follow in Chapters 9–18, with sample project ideas from each, as well as undergraduate research conference abstracts. The final chapter is an annotated guide to online resources that students can access and readily operate. Each chapter opens with inspiring quotations, and wraps up with applicable discussion questions. Professors and students can use Undergraduate Research in Music: A Guide for Students as a text or a reference book in any course that has a significant opportunity for the creation of knowledge or art, within the discipline of music or in connecting music with other disciplines.

This is a deliberately provocative book crossing many disciplinary boundaries and locating music and art education within a context of contemporary social and political problems in a time of growing disruption and authoritarianism. Intended firstly for music teacher educators, practicing music teachers, and graduate and undergraduate music education majors, the book also speaks to arts and media studies teachers, parents, or others interested in exploring how composing, performing, improvising, conducting, listening, dancing, teaching, learning, or engaging in music or education criticism are all political acts because fundamentally concerned with social values and thus inseparable from power and politics. Among the book’s central themes are the danger of democratic deconsolidation in the West and how music education can help counter that threat through the fostering of democratic citizens who are aware of music’s ubiquity in their lives and its many roles in shaping public opinion and notions of truth, and for better or for worse! The arts can obviously be used for ill, but as George Orwell demonstrated in his own work, they can also be employed in defense of democracy as modes of political thought and action affording opportunities for the revitalization of society through its re-imagining.

The book was written for all students, not just the musically-gifted. It encourages students to view music from a social context rather than as abstract information.

The Second Edition of Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs offers updated accounts of music educators' experiences, featured as vignettes throughout the book. An accompanying Practical Resource includes lesson plans, worksheets, and games for classroom use. As a practical guide and reference manual, Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs, Second Edition addresses special needs in the broadest possible sense to equip teachers with proven, research-based curricular strategies that are grounded in both best practice and current special education law. Chapters address the full range of topics and issues music educators face, including parental involvement, student anxiety, field trips and performances, and assessment strategies. The book concludes with an updated list of resources, building upon the First Edition's recommendations.

In this book author Cathy Benedict challenges and reframes traditional ways of addressing many of the topics we have come to think of as social justice. Offering practical suggestions for helping both teachers and students think philosophically (and thus critically) about the world around them, each chapter engages with important themes through music making and learning as it presents scenarios, examples of dialogue with students, unit ideas and lesson plans geared toward elementary students (ages 6-14). Taken-for-granted subjects often considered beyond the understanding of elementary students such as friendship, racism, poverty, religion, and class are addressed and interrogated in such a way that honours the voice and critical thinking of the elementary student. Suggestions are given that help both teachers and students to pause, reflect and redirect dialogue with questions that uncover bias, misinformation and misunderstandings that too often stand in the way of coming to know and embracing difference. Guiding questions, which anchor many curricular mandates, are used throughout in order to scaffold critical and reflective thinking beginning in the earliest grades of elementary music education. Where does social justice reside? Whose voice is being heard and whose is being silenced? How do we come to think of and construct poverty? How is it that musics become used the way they are used? What happens to songs initially intended for socially driven purposes when their significance is undermined? These questions and more are explored encouraging music teachers to embrace a path toward socially just engagements at the elementary and middle school levels.