What can be learned from two films with "rock" and "school" in their titles, about rock in school and about music and schooling more broadly? "School of Rock" (2003), a "family comedy," and "Rock School" (2005), a documentary, provoke a range of questions, ideological and otherwise, surrounding the inclusion of rock in formal instructional…

Providing genuine opportunities for musical engagement is a constant challenge for music educators. Throughout their working lives, they may find "authentic" moments of musical engagement ever harder to manifest. The potential obstacles are numerous: the size or configuration of physical space, the number of instruments available, the quality of…

A basic premise of this essay is that music education practice is a form of--a broadly conceived notion of--political practice insofar as it creates situations where specific meanings are produced, attitudes built, identities shaped, and hierarchies of musical and social values constructed. Every music education practice expresses, and at the same…

The authors have chosen to move together in examining the issue of social justice because they both struggle with the pedagogical implications of what it means to be in this world. As the authors seek to embody the dialectic process of creating new understandings in their lives, and thus in their classrooms, they seek also to create this through…

The topics of "social justice" and "equity" have certainly captured the attention of a broad constituency of seemingly well-intentioned individuals, not only in disciplines related to the social sciences, the historical provenance of such constructs, but also in humanities fields and in the discipline of education. Upon examining the varied uses…

While educators in other fields have made significant strides in incorporating issues of social justice in their foundations and curricula, and while a few music education theorists have labored to move everyone in this direction, music education lags behind. Hence the author's plan for this paper. First, the author reflects on the concept of…

The winning of an artist representing the lowest level of Finnish musical taste during the 2006 Eurovision song contest marks not only the rebellious attitude towards the over-sanitized contest, but it was the result of a new practice--voting by text message. Recently, music-biased schools that were once selective of the music they teach are now…

This essay explores the limits and bounds of music education's professional "We". It argues essentially that music education cannot become more socially just until it becomes more inclusive of diversity--and this means diversity of musics, peoples, voices, values, and more. The author argues that until the current homogeneity of music education…

Writing from the perspective of anti-racist theory, the author is hopeful that the newfound interest in social justice may make lasting differences in the ways music education is conceived and practiced; and yet she is understandably wary, pointing to the numerous and serious misunderstandings often associated with altruistic but naive approaches…

In recent years, music educators have become interested in linking music education practices, programs and projects to issues of social justice. However, theoretical approaches to conceptualizing the problem or to developing strategic interventions have yet to occur within the field. In this paper, the author argues that to address social justice…

This article offers a highly-nuanced account of social justice that attempts to get beyond the facile and familiar rhetoric of "fairness" to more grounded, material, and embodied understandings of injustice. In an analysis that revolves around the concepts of performativity, legibility, and "the abject"--the "radically excluded"--the author argues…

The fourth volume in the Routledge series "Understanding Feminist Philosophy," Carolyn Korsmeyer's "Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction," aims to provide undergraduate philosophy students with some grounding in feminist aesthetics. The initial chapters provide a clear, although not unproblematical, summary of the ways gender is implicated in…

The new reader "Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction" is part of a series "designed for students who have typically completed an introductory course in philosophy and are coming to feminist philosophy for the first time". Why should music educators adopt this feminist introduction to gender and aesthetics when they can readily turn to more…

This article presents the author's response to the reviewers of her essay "Gender and Aesthetics." The reviewers have advanced some interesting disagreements regarding the author's speculations about the use of disgust in feminist and postfeminist art, and the connections that she draws between the disgusting and the sublime. In this article, the…

Transformation, by definition, requires change. Not superficial change, but systematic, focused, substantial, fundamental change; in a word, improvement. Change, and the eventual transformation of music education itself, requires a complete rethinking from the ground up of the why, what, how of music teaching--not to forget "whether" music…