Music Education For Social Change

Music Education for Social Change: Constructing an Activist Music Education develops an activist music education rooted in principles of social justice and anti-oppression. Based on the interviews of 20 activist-musicians across the United States and Canada, the book explores the common themes, perceptions, and philosophies among them, positioning these activist-musicians as catalysts for change in music education while raising the question: amidst racism and violence targeted at people who embody difference, how can music education contribute to changing the social climate? Music has long played a role in activism and resistance. By drawing upon this rich tradition, educators can position activist music education as part of a long-term response to events, as a crucial initiative to respond to ongoing oppression, and as an opportunity for youth to develop collective, expressive, and critical thinking skills. This emergent activist music education—like activism pushing toward social change—focuses on bringing people together, expressing experiences, and identifying (and challenging) oppressions. Grounded in practice with examples integrated throughout the text, Music Education for Social Change is an imperative and urgent consideration of what may be possible through music and music education.

This is an important work that addresses the complex issues surrounding musical meaning and experience, and the Western traditional justification for including music in education. The chapters in this volume examine the important subjects of tradition, innovation, social change, the music curriculum, music in the twentieth century, social strata, culture and music education, psychology, science and music education, including musical values and education. Additional topics include the origins of mania, aesthetics and musical meaning related to concepts that are well-known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, which are compared to contemporary life. The rise of studies of musical behavior by social psychologists has been an important feature for the last two decades, and the relevance of this development to music education is explored. Articulating the difference between education and entertainment has been central to discussions and debates about the role of music in education since Plato and Aristotle first examined the problem. Many of the questions and issues raised by these two Greek philosophers in ancient Greece about the nature of music and its role in education are highly relevant today, and these are examined in the context of the twenty-first century. The writer stresses that music is a product of specific cultural ways of thinking and doing, and its inclusion in education can only be justified in terms of the importance a particular culture places on its music as a valued art form. The implications for music education are that those teaching music should focus in the ways musicians employ special cultural ways of thinking in their compositions and performance practices, whatever the genre. (Contains 28 illustrations and 2 tables.).

Introduction -- The arts and social change -- The power of utopian thinking -- Transforming society -- Music education and utopia -- Conclusion.

Knowledge and Music Education: A Social Realist Account explores current challenges for music education in relation to wider philosophical and political debates, and seeks to find a way forward for the field by rethinking the nature and value of epistemic knowledge in the wake of postmodern critiques. Focusing on secondary school music, and considering changes in approaches to teaching over time, this book seeks to understand the forces at play that enhance or undermine music’s contribution to a socially just curriculum for all. The author argues that the unique nature of disciplinary-derived knowledge provides students with essential cognitive development, and must be integrated with the turn to more inclusive, student-centred, and culturally responsive teaching. Connecting theoretical issues with concrete curriculum design, the book considers how we can give music students the benefits of specialised subject knowledge without returning to a traditional past.

How can we better understand the past, present and future of Social Action through Music (SATM)? This ground-breaking book examines the development of the Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín (the Network of Music Schools of Medellín), a network of 27 schools founded in Colombia’s second city in 1996 as a response to its reputation as the most dangerous city on Earth. Inspired by El Sistema, the foundational Venezuelan music education program, the Red is nonetheless markedly different: its history is one of multiple reinventions and a continual search to improve its educational offering and better realise its social goals. Its internal reflections and attempts at transformation shed valuable light on the past, present, and future of SATM. Based on a year of intensive fieldwork in Colombia and written by Geoffrey Baker, the author of El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (2014), this important volume offers fresh insights on SATM and its evolution both in scholarship and in practice. It will be of interest to a very varied readership: employees and leaders of SATM programs; music educators; funders and policy-makers; and students and scholars of SATM, music education, ethnomusicology, and other related fields.

While attention has been paid to various aspects of music education in China, to date no single publication has systematically addressed the complex interplay of sociopolitical transformations underlying the development of popular music and music education in the multilevel culture of China. Before the implementation of the new curriculum reforms in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was neither Chinese nor Western popular music in textbook materials. Popular culture had long been prohibited in school music education by China’s strong revolutionary orientation, which feared ‘spiritual pollution’ by Western cultures. However, since the early twenty-first century, education reform has attempted to help students deal with experiences in their daily lives and has officially included learning the canon of popular music in the music curriculum. In relation to this topic, this book analyses how social transformation and cultural politics have affected community relations and the transmission of popular music through school music education. Ho presents music and music education as sociopolitical constructions of nationalism and globalization. Moreover, how popular music is received in national and global contexts and how it affects the construction of social and musical meanings in school music education, as well as the reformation of music education in mainland China, is discussed. Based on the perspectives of school music teachers and students, the findings of the empirical studies in this book address the power and potential use of popular music in school music education as a producer and reproducer of cultural politics in the music curriculum in the mainland.

Why teach music? Who deserves a music education? Can making and learning about music contribute to the common good? In Humane Music Education for the Common Good, scholars and educators from around the world offer unique responses to the recent UNESCO report titled Rethinking Education: Toward the Common Good. This report suggests how, through purpose, policy, and pedagogy, education can and must respond to the challenges of our day in ways that respect and nurture all members of the human family. The contributors to this volume use this report as a framework to explore the implications and complexities that it raises. The book begins with analytical reflections on the report and then explores pedagogical case studies and practical models of music education that address social justice, inclusion, individual nurturance, and active involvement in the greater public welfare. The collection concludes by looking to the future, asking what more should be considered, and exploring how these ideals can be even more fully realized. The contributors to this volume boldly expand the boundaries of the UNESCO report to reveal new ways to think about, be invested in, and use music education as a center for social change both today and going forward.

"The arts and particularly music are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society's current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change? This book offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. It is optimistic and realistic. It rethinks music education's relation to social change and offers a new vision in terms of music education as utopian theory and practice. This allows to unearth the utopian energy of the music education profession and to openly imagine how the world could be otherwise - while at the same time critically scrutinizing respective conceptions. Utopia, being an important topic in sociology and political science, offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education's relation to social change. However, music education is not only a means for social transformation. It also has artistic and aesthetic dimensions. Thus, connecting music education with utopia leads to two approaches in terms of politically or socially responsive music education and esthetic music education. Rethinking music education and social change within the framework of utopia offers much-needed opportunities for reconceptualizing music education in the 2020s"--