Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music …
Tag Archives: schools
Hip-hop teaches confidence lessons
I’m working on a paper about music education and hip-hop, and I’m going to use this post to work out some thoughts. My wife and I spent our rare date night going to see Black Panther at BAM. It was uplifting. Many (most?) black audience members came dressed in full Afrofuturistic splendor. A group of …
Learning music from Ableton
Ableton recently launched a delightful web site that teaches the basics of beatmaking, production and music theory using elegant interactives. If you’re interested in music education, creation, or user experience design, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
Ain’t No Makin’ It
Assignment for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson If you’re looking for a gripping and highly readable (though depressing) sociological study, I strongly recommend this one. The purpose of MacLeod’s study is to understand how class inequality reproduces itself, using the example of two groups of young men living in a housing project. He …
Ideological and Theoretical Assumptions
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Artiles, A. J. (2011). Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Educational Equity and Difference: The Case of the Racialization of Ability. Educational Researcher, 40(9), 431-445. Artiles explains how a civil rights victory for learners with disabilities has become a way to oppress racial minority students. He cites …
Classical composers, Bowie and Björk
This post originally took the form of a couple of Twitter threads, which I’ve collected and edited here for easier reading. Greg Sandow asks two very interesting and provocative questions of classical music: When the Museum of Modern Art did its first retrospective of a seminal musical artist, no surprise it was Björk who reached past music …
Measurement in games for learning research
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass Kiili, K., &; Lainema, T. (2008). Foundation for Measuring Engagement in Educational Games. J of Interactive Learning Research, 19(3), 469–488. The authors’ purpose here is to assess flow in educational games, to “operationalize the dimensions of the flow experience.” A flow state involves deep concentration, …
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Cultural hegemony in music education
Music education in American colleges and universities focuses almost entirely on the traditions of Western European aristocrats during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known conventionally as “common practice music.” This focus implies that upper-class European-descended musical tastes are a fundamental truth rather than a set of arbitrary and contingent preferences, and that white cultural dominance …
Despite the Best Intentions
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg The final reading for Learning of Culture is Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools by Amanda Lewis and John Diamond.
High school masculinity
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week’s reading was C. J. Pascoe’s riveting study, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. If you’re at all interested in gender, or the culture of schools, it’s a must-read.