In this article, I explore several complicating factors that impact (White) music teachers as they work towards decolonizing their teaching practices. Created by the discursive structures of settler colonialism, these factors include the discourse of an additive multiculturalism, both in society and in the field of music education, the tendency to…

This article conceptualizes and discusses change in music teacher education. Results from the FUTURED research project provide the starting point for the article. The project explored various dimensions of change within the music education programs in Norwegian generalist teacher education. In this project, change was regarded as having a…

Given the hierarchies, limitations, and power embedded in institutions such as schools, this paper examines whether an activist music education that occurs inside of school can be truly revolutionary. I draw upon Deleuze and Guattari's (2005/1987) treatise on "Nomadology and the War Machine" as a conceptual framework for this…

In this article I suggest that SINEM--the Costa Rican version of Venezuela's El Sistema--articulates a development discourse which legitimates neoliberal policies that govern the twenty-first-century international market, in which Costa Rica figures only as a subaltern. I contend that such articulation contributes to perpetuating notions and…

In this paper, I advocate for the use of explicit language for discussions of race and call for music education to move out of terminal naivety (Vaugeois 2013) toward a heightened consciousness of political issues and racial oppressions. Employing critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework, this paper examines race-related silences and…

In the summer of 2011 (June 16-19), the MayDay Group met in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) for MayDay Colloquium 23, with presentations and discussions on the theme,"The End(s) of Music Education? A Call for Re-Visioning": In a time of rapidly changing political processes, power relations, and policies, music educators are challenged to…

Archetypal images in stories and lyrics such as Lehi's Dream in the Book of Mormon, Country Mouse and the City Mouse, and selected Country music lyrics grow from perceptions of social, cultural, and geographical realities. For their purveyors, they likely stem from personal experience as the proverbial Country Mouse in the city and/or from…

Communities, schools, their music programs, and the individuals who participate in these groups are tied to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they reside. Schools are often connected to their communities, and are often deeply cherished in rural communities. School music programs hold the potential to influence a small…

This paper explores the effects and problems of one highly influential default setting of the "normal style template" of music education and proposes some alternatives. These do not require abandoning all traditional templates for school music. But re-setting the default settings does depend on reconsidering the promised function of…

The hardship and pleasure of a life in ethics, as in music, springs not from a commitment to the veneration of stability, refinement and consistency, as some political and aesthetic discourses often suggest. Rather, the productive tensions of ethical living arise from a restless interaction between constant motion and adaptability; both marks of…

Axiology is the philosophical discipline that studies questions of value. It is centrally concerned, then, with both the arts and with ethics and morality. Music teaching clearly involves questions of musical value and, because the wellbeing of students is at stake, teaching engages a wide range of ethical responsibilities. However, music…

Music education is generally equated with the act of teaching music. In "The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice," the remarkable book that orients the essays in this issue of "Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education," Chris Higgins argues, among other things, that the view of teaching as a helping profession--one…

In his book, Chris Higgins acknowledges the challenges of teaching associated with heavy workloads, increasing responsibilities, and often diminishing respect from the very public institutions that teachers serve. However, his purpose is not to deplore the external conditions of teaching but to raise concerns about its service culture. He argues…

In his recent monograph, Chris Higgins (2011) offers a remarkably original, thoughtful, and provocative argument for "an ethics of professional practice" for teachers. His study brings together a wealth of ideas and authors not often discussed in relation to each other, and it draws out elusive themes and ideas often overlooked in most…

Turner's (1974) conception of liminal space provides an entry point to look beyond the given and to create opportunities to examine, critique, and challenge the assumptions inherent in many music programs. Building upon his theory of liminality as a place that is "ambiguous, neither here or there, betwixt and between all fixed points of…