Popular songs are ubiquitous in the lives of school-age children, but the construction of traditional school music curricula does not always provide an adequate framework for studying them. In particular, the salience of words qua lyrics is an inescapable feature of popular songs, and recognizing the musical properties of those lyrics opens for…

When novice music educators abandon their expressed dedication to forward-looking ideas like equity, epistemological distinctions between belief and knowledge, or lack of such distinctions, may influence such action. Political philosopher Russell Hardin argued that it makes sense for people to hold false, conflicting, and even extreme beliefs.…

Music education is a social act oriented around interactions between people in public spaces. These spaces provide opportunities for what Hannah Arendt calls natality, which we interpret as new and unexpected actions that arise in a shared space. Drawing from a range of ideas and experiences of Arendt, bell hooks, Joan Baez, Martha Nussbaum, and…

This theoretical inquiry approaches the challenge of reflexivity in the music education profession from the perspective of a collective and social understanding of memory. While memory is typically understood as being an individualistic, psychological, and cognitive phenomenon, in this paper we argue that the perspectives of collective and social…

This essay explores performance-driven aspects of U.S. bands in the contexts of Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Jacques Derrida's Aporias, and the author's experience teaching both elementary general music and beginning band. The author wonders what band education might look like when…

What forms of practices can we observe in music education settings? Is it always music just because there are instruments in the room and some sounds are produced or because we can identify some pieces of a musical work now and then? Or is it because the children are engaged in self-determined activities? Or does the verbalization of behavior in…

For decades, education has been inundated with neoliberal policies described as enabling its structures to adjust to a global knowledge economy. Located at the intersection of such "reform" language and classical liberal economic theory is a troubling paradox--the idea that knowledge should be centrally concentrated in order to…

In this paper, I offer my reading of John Dewey's Art as Experience and propose implications for music education based on Dewey's ideas. Three principal questions guide my task: What are some key ideas in Dewey's theory of art? How does Dewey's theory of art fit within his larger theory of experience? What are the implications of Dewey's ideas for…

The pedagogical aim of liberation, as drawn from critical pedagogy, poses significant philosophical problems. In this paper, I argue that the fundamental right to direct the education of children rests with the family situated within a particular local community. This authority is then delegated to the state through the institution of the school…

Over the past quarter century, charter schools have evolved from a fringe educational philosophy to a prominent academic option for American school children and their families. While the history and political positioning of charter schools have been well documented, the tenet of choice continues to be central in the debate regarding the merit of…

In the pedagogy of Western classical string music, creativity is often viewed according to the works of luminary composers, suggesting the question: how might string teachers, students, and musicians conceive of creativity? After problematizing standard definitions and ontological ideas of musical creativity, I outline an open model using the…

In considering the potential of world music in music education, we might imagine ways to think about musics in cultural context or on their own terms. Engaging musics on their own terms involves embracing epistemological diversity; different epistemological frameworks accompany different musics and treating musics ethnocentrically is both an…

In this paper, I apply John Cage's wide musical embrace of sound to the field of music education and explore its curricular and practical implications. In particular, I ask music teachers to consider themselves teachers of sound, or "sound teachers." I argue that privileging sound as our chief concern leads us to reconsider the ways we…

This article is divided into three parts: the problem (globalized learning); the consequences (for general music education); and the vision (the music teacher as a cultural figure). In the first part, I claim that the current learning agenda is being increasingly instrumentalized as a carrier of a global education policy driven by technical…

Despite today's proclaimed open-mindedness, a certain uniformity of thought, followed by a flattening of practices, can be observed in the processes of quality improvement in higher education. This narrowing of thought, which I call "relevance rationality," is an offshoot of instrumental reason and represents a debased,…