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Contemporary Issues

Updating Music Programs Panel at SXSW 2019

Let’s get people talking about music education at the 2019 SXSW Festival! Please vote for the VH1 Save the Music Foundation’s SXSW panel: Remixing and Reimagining Music Education. As a panel member (with your help) I’ll share current thinking and great things happening across music education. We’ll discuss collaboration, contemporary musicianship, and technology. We’ll also consider how the music industry can help music teachers update and expand access to music programs. So, let’s make sure music education is represented at SXSW 2019!  Therefore,… Read More »Updating Music Programs Panel at SXSW 2019

Re-situating Technology in Music Education: Social & Cultural considerations

Tobias, E. S. (2017). Re-Situating Technology in Music Education. In S. A. Ruthmann & R. Mantie (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (pp. 291-308). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.   It’s often the case that music educators discuss technology in relation to tools and techniques. My chapter Re-Situating Technology in Music Education in The Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education focuses on re-situating technology in relation to social and cultural issues.       Here’s the abstract:… Read More »Re-situating Technology in Music Education: Social & Cultural considerations

Making Positive Impact Through Music

Making Positive Impact Through Music Music educators have a role in facilitating responses, music learning and teaching in relation to hate and bigotry occurring throughout contemporary society.  Valerie Strauss suggests that “The first thing teachers should do when school starts is talk about hatred in America” and provides numerous resources for doing so. Music plays an important role in helping people make sense of, meaning, of, and respond to the world. Music programs can play an important role in supporting young… Read More »Making Positive Impact Through Music

A brave new world: Theory to practice in participatory culture and music learning and teaching

Waldron, J., Mantie, R., Partti, H., & Tobias, E. S. (2018). A brave new world: Theory to practice in participatory culture and music learning and teaching. Music Education Research, 289-304. doi:10.1080/14613808.2017.1339027

A brave new world: Theory to practice in participatory culture and music learning and teaching is available for free for a limited time. (If you would like to read the article but do not have institutional access after the free version is no longer available contact me via the comment section or via email.)

It was an absolute pleasure to co-author A brave new world: Theory to practice in participatory culture and music learning and teaching with Janice Waldron, Heidi Partti, and Roger Mantie. The article (now available online) builds on our collaborative presentation at RIME 9. 

Here’s the abstract:

The four perspectives in this paper were first presented as an interactive research/workshop symposium at RIME 9. The purpose of the symposium was to connect new media scholar Henry Jenkins’s theory of ‘participatory culture’ (1992, 2006, 2009) to possible practices of ‘participatory culture’ in diverse music teaching and learning contexts. We ask: If participatory culture exists in music learning contexts – what is it? What are its dimensions? What does participatory culture look like and mean in other music cultures and different contexts/‘places’ (e.g. online, offline, and convergent settings)? Who can and who can’t participate? How might this idea cause us to re-think some of our practices?

Each of us provides a different perspective moving from the general to the specific to the philosophical addressing aspects of participatory culture as it relates to possibilities and challenges for music learning and teaching. 

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Performing Music with Digital Media

Check out Sight Machine by Trevor Paglen, Kronos Quartet, and Obscura Digital commissioned by Cantor Arts Center (recently featured on WIRED): You can also read a New York Times article by Julie Baumgardner about Sight Machine and themes of the project.  I find this collaboration interesting for some of the following reasons in relation to music learning and teaching: it explores socio-cultural issues through the arts it is driven by artistic inquiry  it combines digital media and acoustic instruments in a hybrid… Read More »Performing Music with Digital Media