Currents of Change in the Music Curriculum

Abstract

Calls for change in curricular practice are ubiquitous in education. The generative tension between traditional views of teaching and learning and innovative proposals for refining, extending, or discarding those traditions feeds the wellspring of curricu-lar discourse. Curriculum studies in music education benefit from probing dialectical tensions between preservation and innovation (Jorgensen, 2003). The triumvirate of foundational disciplines in music education – philosophy, psychology, and historical studies – provide insights into traditional practices of learning and teaching music and also point the way toward avenues of change. For example, principles from utilitarian, aesthetic, and praxial views have stimulated a lively examination of classroom prac-tices in music and their ultimate aims (Elliott, 1995, 2005; Mark, 1982; McCarthy & Goble, 2005; Reimer, 2003). The cognitive, developmental, and social perspectives of music psychology have fueled interest in deeper levels of musical thinking within music classrooms (Hargreaves, Marshall, & North, 2003). Historical scholar-ship in music education has described the roots and branches of influence that inform our practices while giving us a platform from which to interrogate our culturally and politically embedded routines and conventions (McCarthy, 2003). These core founda-tions have in turn been informed and revitalized through the cross-fertilization of perspectives from sociology (DeNora, 2003; Shepherd & Vulliamy, 1994), ethnomusi-cology (Campbell, 2004; Stock, 2003), and policy studies (Barresi, 2000; Chapman, 2004; Spruce, 2002). Qualitative research – particularly ethnography, case studies, narrative research, and phenomenology – also deepens our understanding of the mean-ingful and situated nature of the musical experience (Bresler, 1995, 1996; Flinders & Richardson, 2002). As many voices animate this curriculum discourse, the curriculum field becomes more complex, crowded, and contested. Confidence in the prescriptive, scientific, rational, linear, and falsely tidy paradigm of curriculum planning that has been prom-ulgated and widely accepted in education for decades has eroded and given way to a panoramic (some might say vertiginous) array of claims, criticisms, projects, and opportunities. The commonly held notion that research drives practice is worn and misguided and is a view amplified by Westbury who suggests that " traditional educa-tional theory and research must be regarded as a failed project, at least when seen from the viewpoint of improving schooling in a sustained and sustaining way " (2002, p. 156). Complementary, synergistic views of theory and practice are needed. Wing (1992) suggests that that the curriculum is best understood as the point of mediation between an idea of education and practice, a perspective consistent with Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman who maintain that " in the contemporary field, theory and practice are often regarded as embedded in each other " (2004, p. 56). Indeed, Pinar and his colleagues move curriculum study beyond traditional purposes of knowledge generation by giving such inquiry a situated, contextual, and purposeful nature: " the point of contemporary curriculum research is to stimulate self-reflection, self-understanding, and social change " (p. 56). Curriculum research in this vein prob-lematizes practice, foregrounds beliefs that are normally obscured, and calls normative conceptions of teaching and learning into question. The reconceptualization of the cur-riculum, situated in the postmodern milieu, challenges music educators to recast beliefs and practices, rather than merely improving and refining traditional programs, materials, and organizational patterns of the field