Arguing for cultural responsiveness in the classroom

What does it mean to be culturally appropriate? What is the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation? What does it mean to be culturally responsive?

Each of these questions could likely be the topic of its own paper, with as many definitions for the terms as people willing to write about it. The easiest one to tackle is the difference between cultural appropriation and appreciation. Appropriation is most commonly defined as the improper use of some part of a culture by someone outside of that culture. Appreciation is when a part of a culture is used in a way that is approved by the members of that culture. An example of cultural appreciation is a 2nd grade class learning how to do a Chinese dragon dance while learning about the Lunar New Year. But where is the line between appreciation and appropriation? Could this example be interpreted as appropriation? Are learning environments automatically exempt from appropriation if the teacher has good intentions? Or must more care be used to avoid misuse of the activity?

In Bonnie Wade's book Thinking Musically, she divides the chapters into sections such as "Thinking about Pitch" or "Thinking about Time" flipping upside down the ideas that Western classically trained musicians have when conceptualizing music outside that canon. But most importantly, she starts with "Thinking about People" indicating that what makes music universal is the humans at the center of it. As Elliott and Silverman purport in "Music Matters" for musical praxis, people must be at the center. And from this perspective it seems obvious that music education, and inclusion of music outside the agreed tradition is not only acceptable, but necessary. From this side of the issue we could argue that all music learned in school is appreciated through learning, as the 2nd graders learn to appreciate the artistry of experienced dragon dancers.

However, is that all there is to being culturally appropriate in the classroom? What about the high school whose band traditions include the campy "native American war song" (especially in a state where a significant Native American population lives)? How about the suburban almost exclusively white school being taught by a white teacher decides to delve into African American pop music and rap? Does the St. Olaf choir get a pass on singing spirituals with a distinct classical sound because Dr. Anton Armstrong happens to be African American?

To be culturally appropriate in the classroom setting is to be culturally responsive to the realities of the people in the room and outside the room. Educators jobs should not be to avoid the hard realities of these questions but to face them in a thoughtful way that honors all of the people involved. In this way, the teacher must exercise their expert status and have or acquire technical and contextual knowledge of the culture students are learning about, as Estelle Jorgensen says in her chapter about rule and law. But also as Jorgensen says in her chapter about "Seashore and Energy" teachers must also be flexible and open to the reality that there might be other experts including the students who can contribute to a more authentic experience. Being culturally appropriate and responsive avoids appropriation when all the humans (composer, artist, teacher, student, audience) are respected throughout the process.

Music in our Schools Month

The title of this post is "Music in our Schools Month" which feels a little surreal because there's no school happening right now. Not happening in any real way, that is. Everything we do right now, all our little routines, our complex and intricate web of functioning society has just commenced a massive shift to maybe save a large portion of our most vulnerable population.

And because schools have shut down and moved online for now, I've seen many music teachers express frustration about how does one even teach an ensemble class online? Death by worksheet? Creative projects? Theory websites and playing tests? And almost overnight a plethora of ideas came forth. Shared documents, Facebook groups, links to Pinterest boards and dedicated websites. Survival. Give our supervisors and administrators an excuse to keep paying us though they must surely know this is not ideal for any sort of teaching and learning.

Among my professional performer and artist freelance friends, I see two themes: First, they are justifiably worried about how they will pay their bills. They express gratitude for significant others who can float them or gratitude for day jobs that will squeak them through for now. Others who are not so lucky to have that cushion don't know where help will come from but are putting on a brave face and doing the best they can. Second, they are all continuing to make art, even if just for themselves---because it keeps them sane in a world that feels more and more like it's completely upside down.

I'm also taking philosophy of music education this term for my PhD program and we keep coming back to why is music different? Why educate in the arts at all? And I think THIS. THIS SITUATION IS WHY WE DO THIS. Forget about the theory worksheets for now. How are students using music to get them through this terrible time? How are we as music educators encouraging them to use music to get through this? How will they use it to get through hard times in the future? THAT is the purpose of educating in the arts. Not for better math scores. Not because it helps them get into college. Because it's part of their humanity. Because we can rage through it. Because we can weep through it. Because we can laugh through it. Because we can unite through it.

Music in Our Schools Month and every month always.

And to end this post, I'd like to play one of the first songs I ever learned on guitar: A communion song that was written by my high school choir director. I had already decided to be a music teacher before I took his class, but it was largely because of my experience there that I ended up teaching choir (although I did also teach band for a while). I decided not to sing in this video because I can't find the CD and I don't remember all the words, my guitar playing isn't as secure as piano (ha!), and also because I didn't trust myself to not cry. It's been a day.

Summary of Musical Understanding

Elliott and Silverman begin the chapter on musical understanding by defining what it is not: Exclusively "basic musicianship skills" such as dictation, notation, sight-singing, technical facility, or other surface level technical skills whether physical or verbal. Later in the chapter, they include this as a specific kind of musical knowing, but they argue that this is only one aspect, not musical understanding as a whole.

Following the idea that musicing is something people do, they set a litmus test for musical understanding as experiences that are "satisfying, meaningful, enjoyable, transformative, and personal-musical growth experiences" (p 202) and that teaching-learning episodes should "spark, support, enliven, arouse, sustain, and advance positive personal experiences" which seem to support the earlier argument that musicing is human experience that is more than the sum of parts. The ways of knowing and thinking musically according to the authors are split into ten parts.

1. Embodied and Enactive--- The mind and body cannot be separated, so a holistic musical knowing will include aspects of knowing with the body as it is connected to the mind.

2. Musicianship and Listenership--- This is the decision making process, what do we want to teach, learn or communicate and how? 

***3. Procedural--- You can only know by doing. Elliott explains this way of knowing is only possible through direct experience. For example, a military wife may know many aspects of Army culture or things like chain of command, but knowing those things and living them are very different experiences that affect procedural knowledge. Where this seems problematic for music, however, is the idea that people cannot possibly have procedural knowledge about music if they have never done music. The procedural knowledge of the clarinet player surely affects their listening experience to a clarinet performance. However, if this is taken to the author's logical end, conductors could never be proficient at procedural knowledge because there is no way to become that proficient at all of the possible instruments. So while I see his point, I think procedural should be included with experiential (#5) to be clear that any who experience music can have some procedural knowledge.

4. Verbal--- This is the one referred to in the opening statement, most commonly perceived as "musical understanding" as defined in standards, assessments, and written curriculum.

5. Experiential--- The knowledge developed by people as they do music. For example, a person who spent their life playing electric bass for a rock band will have a very different experience than someone who has been trained in a classical style. They may both be considered professionals, and have some shared experiential knowledge (such as negotiating pay for a gig) but their experiential knowledge (how to balance sound in an amplifier vs. balancing acoustic sound with a pipe organ) will be very different. Not better than one another, but different.

6. Situated--- How people use their musical knowledge together as a group, in a relational sense.

7. Intuitive--- Non-verbal, feelings. Elliott and Silverman warn this one can be misleading, as it is grounded in strongly felt sense rather than processes of logic, but can still be a useful tool. I suspect this one is highly valued by the author who comes from a jazz background, and jazz musicians tend to rely on this after many years of verbal and experiential knowledge growth.

8. Appreciative--- Recognizing a creative opportunity as a possibility rather than an obstacle. When a teacher utilizes an organic "learning moment" to expand the musical knowledge of the students, rather than rigidly sticking to a lesson plan, they are demonstrating this aspect of musical knowing.

9. Ethical--- The knowledge we use to make ethical decisions about what pieces we choose to teach or perform, and the context that has to be involved in that decision making process. This could probably be included in the musicianship and listenership, or the verbal ways of knowing since it is a more cognitive way of processing musical knowledge. It doesn't seem very useful to separate it out.

10. Supervisory--- This way of knowing is specifically the musicianship-listenership-verbal from the teacher/conductor point of view. This is holistic knowing, and planning with intent what experiential and situated knowledge a leader wants their ensemble or class to know.

Picking on Elliott

This week's assignment was to "play the naysayer" to one of Elliott's main themes in chapters 2-3. As I started reading I remembered what Dr. Abril said about how we can read all sorts of contradictory philosophical works and agree with all of them because of how well the argument is presented. I started out this week's reading wondering what I could choose to "pick the naysayer" to because I didn't immediately see anything with which I had a gut-reaction disagreement.

However, in Chapter 2, as he discusses the definition of "praxis" he lists out the parts, and sums it up as basically that music is more than the sum of the parts. He demonstrates this by saying music cannot be separated out from the "social, cultural, ethical, economic"--or more commonly understood extra-musical values that are integrated into thoughtful musical education praxis.

While I agree that those extra-musical values are interwoven into a quality music education experience, he quotes Bowman on page 51 as saying "music as a social act and a social fact, instead of music as an entity [a thing] to which my relationship is aesthetic, receptive, and somehow individual in nature." He says this as if the aesthetics of musical experience is not also integrated into praxis. Aesthetics is a value or value judgment on arts, and from my own experience it is clear to me that the aesthetic value a student places on a piece of music is directly related to their motivation to learn it, or work together with others to improve it. If we do not critically educate students about how to make aesthetic judgments, they will gravitate towards that which is already familiar. And if students are not learning new things in a music classroom, only rehashing what is comfortable, why would we even need music educators to do anything beyond the techne? I would argue that the aesthetic is the value that equals more than the sum of the parts.

When everything is highlighted, nothing is.

The title of this post refers to a line from Pixar's The Incredibles where the villain Syndrome says "because when everyone is a superhero, no one will be." I'll come back to that.

Fifteen years ago, my husband and I started the summer master's program at Northwestern. In two of those classes we covered some or all of the Reimer 3rd edition of Philosophy of Music Education. Basically, our copy of the book is well worn, and full of highlighting and notes penciled in the margin. (I also discovered some old photocopies of a Power Point presentation where my friend Wayne and I were passing notes to each other in class).

But as I started reading, I wondered if my highlighted sections or my notes (or Tyson's notes) would still resonate with me. Will I still regard the text the same way with twelve more years of teaching under my belt? Or has nothing changed and I'll just read and renew my same positions? So in re-reading, I used a different color to highlight, but wondered if very much changed will everything be highlighted?

The first thing that I notice is the sentence "Our profession needs such guidance at both the collective and the individual levels" (p 2). Because I was only 4 years into my career when I first read parts of this book, I read it on the individual level, how does this affect me and my students? Now I read it with the hopes of eventually teaching those who want to be teachers which means I must read it with the bigger picture in mind. Younger me completely missed the "philosophy is not advocacy" and that approaching it that way can be a weakness since the arguments would be easily overcome.

For example, "if, on the other hand, we have the feeling that our work is of doubtful value,...we can only feel that much of our life is of equally dubious value (p 3). This makes me think of the various people I have met in urban music programs who came to the profession through some other means such as a freelance performer with alternative or emergency certification and "teaching artists." How can we ever hope to present a united front philosophically if we aren't all even coming to the table with similar pedagogical training? Maybe dividing us that way isn't a bug, maybe it's a feature.

As I remembered from before (and from later chapters) "aesthetic education" refers to different levels of musical engagement, or Small's term musicking. The artist/professional has an aesthetic education that is broader or more nuanced than the amateur/aficionado, but Reimer's basic point is that aesthetic education should be for all students, not just the artist/professional. This concept calls into question everything about how secondary music education is currently set up. Our festival and contest systems, scholarship auditions, college entrances, even how we acknowledge or recognize the achievements of music teachers.

I think my transformation can be summed up by the difference in how I structured my syllabus as a first year teacher. In my first few years, I explained the concert/performance requirement in this way "music is a performance art, therefore the biggest part of your grade is the performance" (because otherwise what's the point?). Over time this changed to explaining it as "experiencing" music. Especially as I taught more and more students who could not take a performance class for one reason or another. The performance is not the point, it's a vehicle for the experience of communicating something aesthetic to an audience. Redefining it this way also gives the audience as much value as the artist since without them no musical dialogue can take place.

Can't we all just get along?

Reading the Pedagogy of the Oppressed is as aggravating as it is enlightening. My years teaching children in poverty, immigrant children, minority children makes this text very real and in living color.

In the third chapter, after discussing the role of the teacher as part of the oppressor, Freire discusses the frameworks that teachers work within. To work within a system of oppression as a revolutionary requires critical thought, honest dialogue, and openness to building relationships. It also requires recognition and acknowledgement of the "limit-situations" we find ourselves in. I often tell people that when I worked at Burr Oak and Mather that those kids taught me more than I ever taught them (and I still believe that), and throughout my career there have been moments of profound clarity where the education was more than surface level. But even though those learning experiences happened, it was always accompanied by frustration of limits imposed by people who benefit from the "banking" system. Students pulled from music classes to take "real" subjects, test scores, school accountability, data-driven curriculum. As Freire puts it, "the word is changed into idle chatter" activism without thought (bumper-sticker advocacy), the noise of how we communicate in the modern world.

When I began reading, I related it to my race relations class in the sociology department. I recognized myself as being one of the oppressors--as I benefit from systemic racism and the privilege that accompanies it. As I continued to read, I realized it wasn't as simple as that. The oppressed and oppressors have a relationship dynamic that is maintained by structures, and only with recognition of those structures can the oppressed dismantle them and liberate us all. Therefore I see my role as an educator to provide students with the opportunities to discover this and then assist them  when called upon to do so. Education is not the oppression, it is a framework that can be used for oppression OR liberation.

I appreciate the distinction between revolution and coup since so many people conflate the two.  Revolution requires dialogue, not brute force. And not recognizing the difference is how so many people who intend to be revolutionary (or "woke" in modern parlance) end up becoming oppressors themselves. I think of Obama's first election, and the hope that people had that he would change things for the better but for many reasons I don't have room to discuss here, he was unable to do those things, and what he was able to accomplish ended up reinforcing oppression (school accountability, health care, and military force). I don't think it was for lack of trying, but because the people he needed to work with were not interested in having the honest dialogue that Friere says is necessary for true liberation.

The pendulum swing

In the first Noddings chapter, she first examines historical education philosophers and how their ideas have permeated through time. As she gets to Rosseau, she asks the question "Must they occur in cycles?" referring to the ideological swings in educational philosophy? This made me wonder how the cycles occur. In my own lifetime, the pendulum started swinging hard towards "accountability" first with Reagan in A Nation at Risk, then Clinton with the push for "certificate of mastery" instead of diplomas and the rise of magnet schools and arguments for vouchers starting to take hold. Then as I started my teaching career, No Child Left Behind was passed and all of the previous ideas solidified and embedded themselves in an insidious way. Only now, almost twenty years later from that point have we even begun to question the path that A Nation at Risk set us on. And it has felt like a behemoth task to even question it when very powerful people hold the reins. Especially our current Secretary of Education* who makes decisions that affect us all, I am sure has never examined any educational philosophy, as she has made it clear she does not believe in public education at all, and has no justification other than public education is "failing" (which means she also cannot read basic empirical research or refuses to do so). In that light, it feels like an exercise in futility to debate philosophical approaches when the people that control education in this country are not being equally thoughtful.

Regarding Noddings' first example about school vouchers, I found this article just this morning and basically sums up how I feel. It's not an attack on the parents themselves, but on their reasoning for acting as they do, but fits into what sociologists refer to as the theory of "laissez-faire racism." An attack on the argument and the inherent structures that cause parents to make the decisions they do. And it connects to my statements above---how can we (educators) have a debate among ourselves about how to educate students when the people controlling the system (legislators and bureaucrats) are still fighting us on the who by actively manipulating parents through fear?

Nevertheless, as the saying goes, she persisted. So I read and think on.

In this same way, on the Dewey chapter, Noddings talks about how Dewey's ultimate aim for education was growth for its own sake. And he received pushback, I believe, because the word "education" then (as now) implies a structure, with assumptions about specific outcomes that direct policy and decision making at every level. Had he used the word "learning" instead, maybe he would not have received so much pushback, and that particular theory would have been more universally accepted. Or, by using the word "learning" he could have pushed the definition of "education."

For example, when we speak of meeting students where they are in music (the modern translation of Dewey's experiential model), we talk about starting with music they listen to, such as hip-hop or rock, and then building from that point to the concepts we think they should know (usually musical literacy and classical Western music repertoire). The problem with that, though is, as Noddings says "teachers must ask where a given experience may lead." Without this mindfulness of the process and the end goal, you may end up with a class doing THIS. Therefore, using Dewey's dialectical method, can we resolve the seemingly opposite ends of music education by approaching students where they are with thoughtfulness so that we can accomplish two things: One, students have a voice in their own learning and two, check ourselves with our tendency to impose knowledge on students that may or may not be useful to them?

Lazy brain part deux

In my first blog post, I wrote about how human brains are lazy. This week's readings forced me to confront my own lazy brain. I like checklists, and I like order. So I read the readings in the order they were presented in the reader on Blackboard. Had I even glanced at the content I would have realized I should have started with Nettl and moved backwards to Kant. But I didn't, so I spent two hours struggling with the first ten or so pages of Kant while my brain is screaming "I hate reading translations. I hate 19th century flowery writing!" Or early 20th century. Whatever.

In any case, all of the readings kept bringing up memories of a class I taught at a community college a couple of years ago. The title was "World Beat" and it was meant to be an introductory survey class of ethnomusicology. It was a very popular class because it was a dual credit fulfillment of both Fine Arts and Social Sciences. And since I was given free reign to create whatever lessons I wanted, I structured it this way:
Week-----> Region or Area of the world ---------> Musical concept------->Social Studies concept

So in Week 1, we studied West Africa, rhythms, and the African diaspora/slave trade and how that affected music development.  In Week 2, it was the Middle East, and we talked about pitch and modes and scales and the explosion of music produced during the Arab Spring was used for protest and how protest music can be a powerful tool. Another week we discussed Native Americans (specifically Salish Coast), how music and visual art are connected, and the function of music as a storytelling device that can capture the oral history of a people. It was the most fun I've ever had teaching music and I hope someday I get to do it again because of course there are a thousand little things I'd adjust and change and refine.

The readings brought me back to this class because one of the first topics we discussed in class is "what is music?" because listening to unfamiliar sounds without any warning or prior experience with music education can result in a student reacting negatively and closing off without further examination of what they're actually hearing.  Both quarters that I taught this class they came up with a working definition of "organized noise and silences for the purpose of communication." But communicating what? And to whom? Is it a noun or a verb? Small gives us some answers in Musicking. He argues that music is a verb, something we do, and that any participation in any capacity means you are musicking. Of course with any verb there are passive and active ways of doing. He also says "not so much about music as it is about people" and the ways they use music to interact with one another. I realize now THAT is the real lesson I was teaching my World Beat class.

However, this goes back to Kant, in that if music is about people, then when we make judgments about art, we are also making judgments on people, and preconceived notions and biases about the people and their intentions may color our view of the art (some of my readings from Sociology of Race might also be sneaking into my head here). So what we perceive to be beautiful will always be affected by our own experiences and knowledge, which Small and Nettl both say is problematic because we, as experts in Western Classical Art Music will always have a tendency to use that as the default to compare everything else, even when being mindful of that bias.

We must also then, be mindful of how we present "other" musics to our students. For instance, to explain didgeridoo as it relates to European brass instruments. Or comparing banda to polka. Again, this brings me back to my World Beat students, because many of them were immigrants with no American school music experience, and Western Art Music was just as foreign to them as everything else. It forced me to be more objective in my presentation, pointing out similarities to other things we had listened to but analogies to my "standard" were useless.

However, I think the most salient point is made by Small when he says "the fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do." And this is fundamental to music education because we do this thing as a group, interactively. Even in a lecture style college class, the interaction IS the thing. The connection IS the thing.

Philosophy #2 Human Brains are Lazy

In what ways do these readings challenge you to think differently or offer you new insights about art?

Source readings for reference: Elliot & Silverman, Music Matters pp. 24-43; Dewey, How we Think pp. 1-8; Freeland, But is it art?

How we think

I began with Dewey's How we think because it appeared to set the stage for the other two. How can we begin to understand art and what it means without first understanding how our brains process information?

Dewey's definition of different kinds of thoughts are 1) Passing fancies ("My daughter really likes that unicorn stuffy") 2) Non-sensory, storytelling, imagination ("Hey Mommy, what if the unicorn was best friends with the kitty?") 3) Beliefs or assumptions that are unquestioned ("all little girls like unicorns, so that's what I'll get Noelle for her birthday") and 4) Reflection with intention and purpose ("I know Noelle likes unicorns because she told me so, therefore I have evidence that purchasing a stuffed unicorn wouldn't be a waste of money).

As I read several things struck me: His definitions, written in 1910, are still very much relevant. He warns that #2 imaginative storytelling can mimic #4, especially if there is logical flow to it. The way to discern between the two is the intention of pursuing knowledge, belief about facts or truth. I think society's general frustration with modern media stems from this. The reporting we typically see in cable news is not about following facts to a logical conclusion, but rather using facts to create a narrative that serves some purpose or another. How this relates to arts is that we have seen an explosion of artistic satire that pokes fun at the storytelling while also presenting available facts for the audience to draw their own conclusions---promoting reflective thought. Elliot and Silverman reference Stephen Colbert's coinage of the term "truthiness" to make this same point.

This led me to think of two other things: MANY years ago I read both of Rush Limbaugh's first two books. Something that he talked about a lot in the books and on his radio show at that time was how "most people don't actually think, because it's hard work" (And I would say his conclusion is correct as he's built a pretty successful career on that premise).

I also thought of Amanda Ripley, the author of a book called "The Unthinkable" which discusses human behavior in the face of large disasters. In popular media the scripted reaction to a disaster is to panic, run around, scream, etc. What Ms. Ripley documents in her book is that the human brain actually freezes up when presented with new information, because as with all of our muscles, our brains are happiest when being lazy and habitual. When the brain freezes, we call this "cognitive dissonance" and it causes a negative emotional reaction. In a non-emergency situation, the typical reaction is to defend from the negative emotion (thus causing the doubling-down on positions that can't otherwise be defended, the more commonly called "mental gymnastics"). In an emergency situation, the brain has to process the atypical situation and come up with a fact-based logical conclusion about what to do next. THIS is the actual thinking that Dewey refers to in #4. Perplexity, hesitation, searching, inquiry, conclusion. And it takes time for the brain to do this, thus causing the non-Hollywood reaction of "freezing up"

(There's a lot more I could say about this book, it's amazing and fascinating and everyone should read it, along with "What's the Worst That Could Happen" by Greg Craven that discusses cognitive dissonance in way more detail).

The function of philosophy

I think part of the brilliance of the way my master's program was set up was that we weren't stuffed full of facts and knowledge and then sent on our way with a certificate. For six weeks at a time, everything we thought we knew was pulled apart and questioned, examined, and then put back together with new information that we could choose to incorporate or not. Then we were sent back to our classrooms to put into practice what we learned.  Rinse and repeat for four years. This constant evolution of our collective classrooms was a result of philosophy being incorporated into every class, though ranging from subtle to overt. We were constantly challenged to examine our practice and then apply what we learned. It's no wonder that so many of us chose to continue to challenge ourselves in various ways.

As Elliott and Silverman say, mindless teaching is dangerous, because if you don't know why you do something a certain way, you can actually damage a student.  For instance, why do we use letter grades? What useful information does it actually give us? Empirical research says it affects student opinions of themselves, and their motivation. Letter grades also are known in empirical research to only represent how well a student can adapt to their environment, not how much of a subject they've actually mastered. Why do we use them, then?

But is it art?

My daughter suckered me into watching "America's Got Talent" last night and there was a group of young people from Myanmar who did a performance piece with light and shadows to tell a story of two children who grew up without parents due to war. Set to Billie Eilish and Khalid's "Lovely," not a single face was dry at the end, including the performers. I was introduced to that song by my last 5th grade group when we did our soundtrack project. Seeing that song used in that way made me think about how many of those 5th graders were immigrants and refugees from places like the performers were describing in their story. Hell, I can't even type this paragraph without crying.

So when Freeland asks "but is it art?" I think of my undergrad professors who talked about how neat it is when a child can perform some virtuosic piece of music but it never moved him to emotion other than "wow that's a neat trick" because the student is not putting their own emotion into the process and therefore not really communicating with the audience. Humans long for connection, and art is a way of connecting with others. Anything that promotes a dialogue (through reflective thought, not just speaking or writing) could therefore be considered art of some form.

As arts educators, maybe this means we should be asking not only the "why" questions but also the "why not?"

Philosophy #1 BIG QUESTIONS!!

For my philosophy of music education class, we have to create blog entries.  For the sake of continuity, I'm going to continue using this format because then I'll be able to compare the changes in my thinking to prior blog entries. 😀

Ten BIG questions I have about music education (that I am somewhat sure cannot be answered empirically):

1. Should music be part of the regular school day?

2. Could music be offered in secondary schools in a similar format as P.E.?

3. Why do we think of instruments as being gendered?

4. How do we decide who the "experts" are in our field?

5. Is it useful to measure music for school accountability?

6. Is piano proficiency really necessary for college music majors?

7. Is it more important to build knowledge or creativity in a music classroom?

8. Why is band the "public face" of a music program?

9. Is music education valuable for its own sake or only to supplement other things?

10. Does it matter if music teachers have pedagogical training?