The New Status of Music in Brazilian Schools Since 2012 and the Role of Music Textbooks

Abstract

This chapter is based on a keynote delivered during the 13th International Conference on Textbooks and Educational Media that took place in Berlin in 2015. Its main objective is to understand music textbooks emplacement in the present Brazilian music education. In this scenario, music textbooks assume an important position as teaching support, especially among generalist teachers in pre-school and elementary school. Souza et al. (2009) systematized a wide sample of music textbooks to reveal main teaching conceptions, but there are still many challenges in studying Brazilian music textbooks. One main concern is to define what could be considered as textbook (Choppin 2004), since music teaching tradition often relies mainly on music scores as textbooks. Other aspects may reveal that although many advances influenced Brazilian music education in recent years (Mateiro and Ilari 2012) several textbooks continue with the tradition and didactic orientation of the 1940s. It is possible to assert that many analyzed materials expose a conception of music education aligned with the Eurocentric and privileged cultural classes conceptions. This idea views the music textbook as instrument that promotes social inequality inside school, eventually contributing to maintain certain social status (Bourdieu and Passeron 1992). Beyond the assumption that textbooks represent the selective tradition of school (Forquin 1993), the study of Brazilian music textbooks reveals an important panorama of a country that is rebuilding its own conceptions of music education with the challenges of proposing nationwide textbooks and, at the same time, respecting its multicultural particularities.