Lessons without Limit: Risk, Critical Thinking and Empowerment in a Meaningful Education through Music

Patrick Schmidt – [email protected]
  Florida International University

Introduction

While reflective education has a long history, the active stewardship of complex learning environs is particularly urgent today given three factors: (1) the increasing impact of public policy on education; (2) the deep cultural changes brought about by new media; and (3) the migration of the classroom from a purely physical space to one where virtual components connect us with the entire world. Building upon the notion that learning requires the realization that “creative process is born not of optimization, but of variance” (Repetto 2010), this article outlines how transformative educators should and often do circumvent limitations by recognizing learning communities as a space of tension. This tension or struggle with practice and thought that is unfamiliar or risky is represented conceptually by the question: What would it mean to embrace complexity as imperative for a meaningful education in and through music?

As journalist Thomas Friedman has expressed, “the world is becoming increasingly flat.” This reality has led us toward greater productivity but also toward greater standardization and linearity. Mindful education then must begin with three indispensable concepts: 1) Risk, 2) Critical Inquiry and 3) Empowerment. Successful forms of education then result from instigating the desire or ‘need to know’ that all students possess. This humane vision of teaching views communication and dialogue is central and fosters an interactive commitment to both ethics and innovation. Of course to consider ethics and innovation is indeed a risky proposition in many educative spaces. The operation of schooling is one naturally leaning toward conservatism—-as schools must represent a common understanding of the needs and preferences of many—-and often faced with limited leadership authority, given the tendency for adherence to external policy rather then localized, independent and participatory decision-making structures. Greater still is the challenge of interaction between this mass-oriented system and the nuances of learning demanded by contemporary culture.

The realization that these challenges are stacked against critical educators is the reason why Richard Gibboney (2006) argues convincingly that Thorndike and behaviorism continue to ‘win’ over Dewey and progressive forms of education today. Traditional educative spaces continue to struggle—-regardless of new rhetoric as well as sincere efforts—-with crafting risky dialogue, critical inquiry and empowerment as real and tangible elements in daily practice. This reality is compounded in the midst of current emphasis on accountability measurements that can be quite narrowly construed and 21^st century concern with the gap between access to information and impactful learning. As a music educator then, the question in my mind becomes: Do we easily recognize the difference between a Thorndikean and Deweyan music education? And if and when we do, how do we work to close the gap between a music education that fosters awareness and skill and models that aim at transformative learning in and through music?

Framing Change in Practice and Thought

If we are to address the conundrum articulated above, I would like to argue that a better understanding of the notion of framing might be a helpful starting point. Firstly, it is important to state that framing is not simply the capacity to place something, to situate it, to bring to focus—-all of which are significant in learning and for education in general. Rather, I would like to offer ‘framing’ as the capacity to construct a set of networking relationships, which—-while indeed situating and bringing things to focus—-also and most significantly asks the individual to bring herself into the picture. Framing is not the capacity to take a stand (which implies an unmovable attitude), but to be creatively capable of constructing viewpoints (which are by virtue of their plurality, transient). Constituent of framing then, is the courage and skill of thinking critically and taking risks; the willingness to engage in dialogue; and the development, slow and continuous, of self-empowerment. Framing is the disposition toward establishing a vision, an interpretation or outlook that can facilitate or dispute understanding, making use of complex, albeit manageable parameters.

If one is to educate according to the three parameters above, the necessary first step seems simple enough: we educators ought to, at minimum, be willing to struggle with how to generate pedagogical and conceptual complexity. Let me be clear that by this I do not mean that teaching is always genial, inventive, revolutionary. At times teaching is simple, didactic, explicative. However, while music necessitates repetition, it thrives within variability. The capacity toward framing then, starts from an understanding that complexity is not there to be ‘resolved,’ but represents a ‘natural’ aspect of the milieus we inhabit. Complexity is indeed available to us. And by using it, by developing a more familial relationship with it, we might uncover teaching and learning that is more lasting, inventive, personal, and meaningful. To understand complexity in the context of creativity, for example, is then to see creativity not as a gift but as a constructed capacity developed by exploring available milieus—-something we can ‘get good at it’. Further still it means to consider that creative individuals might indeed be those able and willing to a) take risks (to advance without certainty or fully developed method); b) to dialogue critically (to borrow, appropriate, cite); and c) to work toward self-empowerment (engaging in self and other criticism, for example).

It should be clear then that music education conceived in complex terms does not mean the over emphasis of philosophical conceptualization or abstract thinking, nor does it mean the over valuation of erudite aesthetics and highly specialized skill sets (see Cook, 2003). Music educational practices sympathetic to the notion that complexity is both the precept and the outcome of critical inquiry and artistic creativity, emphasize the multiple roles musics play in communities, and underline the emotional, cultural and economic capital they can generate in the lives of individuals. For those like me working in universities, an easy manifestation of this rhetoric is the undergraduate music curricula. The labor and educative challenges music students face upon graduation today should raise, loudly, the question: what would it mean to create the curricular conditions through which college music students transform technical prowess into concrete artistic endeavors? It is painfully clear, at least in the context of North America, that many and perhaps most music programs continue to foreground skill (technical first and stylistic second) and de-emphasize personal interpretation, collaboration, and conceptual entrepreneurship (for an interesting model that contradicts this stance see Lebler, Burt-Perkings & Carey, 2008). This ethical conundrum is also true in music education where old curricular formulas and accreditation requirements often lead to uninventive and de-individualized curricula, and a focus on apt content delivery—-rather than rigorous critical teaching. In many cases, these are the parameter guiding the formation of teachers.

The central question that emerges from this ‘struggle’ with complexity is then: What are the meanings, models and practices that humane systems of education should offer to an increasingly demanding social experience? Moreover, how do we enact them critically, responsibly and coherently?

Framing Exemplified: Outside Lessons Delineating Complexity

In North America today, the work of Grant Wiggins and his Understanding by Design (UbD), has become common parlance. The central idea of UbD is that curriculum should be designed ‘backwards’, that is, we should look at an enacted outcome, at a product or an interaction, and then plan backwards that which would be necessary to see the product realized (for a brief introduction see http://www.grantwiggins.org/documents/mtuniontalk.pdf). I offer here three video examples that I believe can quickly and aptly help us to see both the challenges and the possibilities that lay ahead for us as musicians and music educators. In their own way all three musical engagements below exemplify disruptive practices, that is they take risks; further all three merge visual, textual and musical concepts to enact a practice that is creative, that is, they offer examples of critical thinking; and all three attempt to ‘frame’ how we might engage with music differently, that is, they arise out of self-empowerment.

The first example is developed by Daito Manabe and his friends, and flips over the quest for music interpretation, raising the question: what happens when music is ‘playing us’. Here we can see several discussions interjected in one innovative presentation of how music can be understood differently, what music ‘does’ to us, or what does it mean to ‘do it wrong’ or use music ‘in a wrong (read untraditional) way.’ Manabe shows how technology can help us to re-think musical practice—-even if not in such an extreme way. His video exemplifies ‘risk-taking’ as a critical characteristic of artistic enterprise.

In the second example, Danny Pi, a young musician, offers an introductory and sardonic way to work and learn under a plurality of sonic and stylistic environs. The video proposes a literal representation of multiple voices speaking at the same time (our plural musical selves) all attempting to disrupt traditional views of musical theory. In the process, Pi shows us how to listen differently to practices that are very common sense (Schmidt 2012). Here is a strong representation of how critical thinking can be made manifest through a constructive and simple (albeit not simplistic) understanding of complexity.

The last example demonstrates a commitment to cultural rights as well as a way to disrupt our image of what classrooms look like. The video places the private classroom in a public setting (an ‘aula pública’) where music, dialogue, and community interaction are essential to teaching. This example, out of Salvador’s EletroCooperativa, exemplifies the ways in which individuals can become music activists, how music education can have an impact on communities and how empowerment is feasible (all three videos can be seen through the following presentation: http://prezi.com/iybycorbcnsv/lessons-michigan)

In all three what is clear is that dialogue and risk-taking, critical thinking, and empowerment cannot be bestowed. We must engage with them seriously, consistently, avidly. In other words, they come to be enacted out of one’s agency. At the same time, I believe all three examples offer excellent material for a backward designing of our own vision for music education. The challenge is how to present our classrooms as spaces where critical thinking is directed at building one’s capacity for adaptability. At a time where music grows as a ‘portfolio’ career, music education is challenged to present instruction that is itself varied, addressing burgeoning genres and styles; fostering multiple musical opportunities, and connecting ‘school music’ to ‘musics-in-the-world.’ Reinvigorated music teaching, therefore, requires musical instruction that is not hapless and takes seriously the socio, cultural, and economic potential of music. Concretely, this might mean: 1) music studies that are compatible with economically viable models; 2) collaborative learning structures that expand and disrupt current labor parameters; 3) community engagements that lead to lifelong interaction with music; and 4) entrepreneurship at the center of new forms of communication and distribution of goods—-artistic or otherwise. These are music educational discourses that teachers must consider and with which students are becoming quite familiar.

What we can and must do then is to provide rich (read complex) frameworks upon which reasonable and feasible spaces are created and where innovation becomes a significant part of apprenticeship. As the three videos show, we can engage in skill development that is contextualized by socially engaged and just practices. In practical terms, the three videos also show how empowerment starts with a call for the uneasiness. This call for uneasiness is not simply rhetoric then, it is also a call for that which is musical, artistic, educative, and thus that which constitutes reflective teaching. Empowered students are likely to emerge from such environments, demonstrating their capacity to develop complex, integrated and challenging lifeworlds and consequently more likely to succeed economically and culturally. All this starts with us, however, at the moment we, teachers, decide to take risks.

The Challenges of De-Professionalized Work: Familiarizing Ourselves with Policy

Risk taking, critical thinking and empowerment are not easy at a time when standardization and mass accountability foster a simplistic presentation of education as the ‘science of instruction.’ In fact, in such conditions the result tends to be what I call sequentialism, or the kind of teaching that works independently of the reactions, contexts, needs, or desires of students (Schmidt 2012b). Of course, sequentialism is not the result of ‘teachers who don’t care’ or a byproduct of low expectations, or a disqualified working force. Teaching, at least in the United States, is a remarkably intensified profession. Teachers work long hours, are required to function within a heavily bureaucratic environment (which is usually restrictive and not welcoming of innovation and creativity) and encounter few opportunities for professional development, often designed and selected by others (see Schmidt & Robbins, 2011).

And while I am very familiar to US realities, these seem to be global concerns as “the intensification of worldwide social relations link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Held 1991:9). Manuel Castells (1996:130) situates teaching challenges in broader terms explaining how economic, cultural and educational issues are both “informational and global because, under the new historical conditions, productivity is generated through and completion is played out in a global network of interactions.”

If we want to understand our challenges—-and confirm why music educators must be attuned to general education and to policy issues alike—-we need to go no further than one place. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is today one of the most impactful organizations in terms of educational standards globally (see OECD 2004). While its educational reports were available since 1961, only in the last two decades have they become widely cited. Indeed, it’s ranking of educational achievement among the current 66 participating nations is one of the most anticipated commentaries on social and economic development worldwide. It is not surprising then that the growth of an organization that places education and its complexities within the economic-driven, and at times simplistic framework of productivity and efficiency, is ideologically aligned with the marketization of education and the alluring “prospect of regular advancement” so important to national political speeches (Barnett & Finnemore 2004:17). It is nevertheless puzzling that regardless of the fact that organizations such as the OECD “have no access to legal or regulatory mechanisms to enforce its prescriptions”, today “hardly any country ignores the OECD’s data and recommendations” (Moutsios 2009:114).

While much of the international ‘accountability’ language, now pervasive in all corners of the world (see this report on London’s BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20498356) is geared toward testing measures and the formation of indicators that focus on teaching as the ‘delivery of content’, one can also find elements that promise the space for teaching and learning as a critical and constructive task. The OECD itself offers opportunities for us, as educators, pedagogues and policy- constructors, to make good use of available language and information. One such example is Van den Broeck’s (2012) notion that accountability can and should be conceptually and practically linked to an understanding of good teaching as that which makes thinking visible. This idea is pertains to teachers and students alike and is codified in the following guidelines for interactions within classrooms and other learning environs:

1. Individual responsibility should be coupled with communal sharing;
2. Multiple zones of proximal development. There should be an emphasis on desired diversity in the classroom, because the essence of team-work is to pool varieties of expertise;
3. Ritual, Familiar Participant Structures. There are a few participation frameworks that are practiced repeatedly. Introduce benchmark lessons, where the teacher or an external expert introduces new information, models thinking skills, or encourages the class to pool their expertise in a novel conceptualization of the topic (Brown 1994);
4. A Community of Discourse. Established early and where constructive discussion, questioning and criticism become the norm;
5. Seeding, Migration, and Appropriation of Ideas. Learners of all ages, both teachers and students, create zones of proximal development by seeding the environment with ideas and concepts. Ideas can then take root in the community, migrate to other members, and persist over time. Other members might appropriate the ideas and concepts, reshape and deploy them, interpret and transform them. (OECD, Van den Broeck 2012: 7)

The trouble of course is that these kinds of report are still peripheral in organizations such as the OECD, mostly lacking in preeminence. Another challenge is that while empirically based they are often not pedagogical—-offering concepts but few exemplars of practice. They serve, however, as both reliable (and legitimate) ‘ammunition’ for teachers and their progressive curricula, as well as an exemplification of the need for a framing capacity in our profession.

In the US the adoption of the new common core curricular standards based on UbD, as mentioned above, also offers some possibilities (see http://www.corestandards.org). The possibilities will be widely reduced, however, if teachers are not able or willing to develop the capacity for critical policy discourse and framing. In the absence of these capacities a responsible and critical implementation of the general guidelines here articulated cannot be fulfilled. The results are likely the failure to avoid implementation that is done at the lowest possible denominator—-a common experience in standardization initiatives.

Given the multiple calls for accountability and innovation the challenge for arts and music education today seems to be to convince the general population that the arts and music can foster something more than mere erudition. At center, I would argue, is the formation of personal and community ‘sovereignship’ rather than the mere development of human capital or status. Sovereignship then is directly linked to and predicated upon framing. As one becomes adept and comfortable with framing ideas and learning opportunities, as one frames dialogical relations with others and with musics, launching into new interpretations, adaptations, and borrowings, one becomes sovereign over one’s own learning. This is similar to Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientization, where one is aware of what one knows and fails to know. Here the added element is the agency driven aspect, the full understanding of one’s identity as a inter-subjective enterprise that is constantly becoming, adapting, and can only do so by way of some of risk-taking. Sovereignship takes place as one interacts with ones work, with one’s doubts, with one’s community and with that which is new, unheard or untouched. But most significantly it happens as one attempts to frame these complex elements into some vision, some possible outcome.

In pragmatic terms sovereignship matters as we in the field of music are regularly reminded of:

1. the changing job status of artists;
2. the variability of markets and how music/art is produced and distributed;
3. the increase emphasis on efficiency in public expenditure;
4. the new consumption and participation patterns in art; the impact on cultural policy of new media and the formation of parallel markets (social markets, for example).

Therefore our capacity to frame matters both artistically and economically. In ethical terms, it is more and more patent that to fulfill pragmatic requirements for subsistence in music we must be growingly connected to what Thomas Turino (2008) calls the politics of participation, or what Lawrence Lessig (2008) calls the capacity for collaborative engagement. And in educational terms we see this ‘translated’ into a disposition for “seeding, migrations and appropriation” cited above by Van den Broeck, which arts and music educators must conceptualize and practically foster within classrooms, garages and community centers.

In this scenario, educators’ global and local challenge is how better to diminish artificial teaching formats and dissolve traditional lines of formality and informality. If as the OECD suggests the question for 21^st century is, In what ways we assure that the classroom is a complex micro- cosmos of our lifeworlds, thus contributing to the democratic production of cultural, educational and economic goods? Our main challenge is to focus on how learning structures and environs can be used, negotiated, even critically exploited so that youth can experience seeding, migration and appropriation in and through music.

The NGO as a Complex Source: Risk, Critical Thinking and Empowerment

For me then, a strategy for moving forward requires that we support participative models where opportunity for collaboration, adaptation and construction of education as a transient cultural experience are enforced. These option are plausible and the basis for cultural and educational policy in countries as varied as Finland and Brazil. The complex and plural opportunities created within Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are an important element that deserves careful consideration.

While we know the existence of “a host of negative beliefs and behaviours toward music in formal schooling, among both learners and teachers, which pose serious challenges for music education and which innovations in policy and practice have had limited success in overcoming” (Lamont & Maton, 2010), we also know that similar occurrences take place in ‘outside school’ environs. In fact, Bebbington at al. (1993) address how, particularly larger NGOs have misrepresented local needs and interests. Schmale (1993) asks for caution against a new development myth which attempts to sell the unlimited potential embedded in NGOs. Fowler (1997) actually argues that NGOs have a “limited capacity to learn, adapt and continuously improve the quality of what they do” (64). In music education, Kleber (2006) places the NGO as a concept within the ‘knowledge economy’ and highlights the “significant offer of musical practices connected to the rescue of youth in exclusionary environments and situations” (p. 94), but cautions that this “emergent field” requires rigorous and pervasive empirical research.

NGOs are present throughout the globe but particularly significant to the educational ecosystem of emergent nations. There, NGOs function not only as a synergic force between communities and their members, but also, and perhaps most importantly, as an impetus toward educational adaptation as a key component in addressing the divergent needs of diverse constituencies¹. The elements that often characterize NGOs—-capacity to identify local needs and ‘realities’; generate adjustments and weighing alternatives—-can also serve as patterns to be used in structured organizations, providing inside-out change while attending to State, or outside-in, mandates. As such, it is clear that NGOs do not work against schools but offer a distinct capacity that warrants continued in-depth analysis.²

The work on numerous Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as Finland’s Resonaari (see http://www.resonaari.fi/?sid=63) is an example of how distributive macro policy is met by participative strategy at the local level. Resonaari presents a case where lines of informality and formality are mostly dissolved by virtue of the complex structure offered by the NGO. Resonaari offers innovative models for the musical education of students with disability, engages their participants in peer-to-peer learning, produces concerts, but most significantly, it provides a clear pathway for the re-thinking of the cultural rights of this population. Further, Resonaari itself functions as a complex system serving as an NGO, a music school, a community center, an advocacy agency, a research center and teacher training space, as well as an active actor in policy. The three elements of risk, critical thinking and empowerment, are woven tightly in Resonaari’s history and the outcome is a path breaking engagement with what an education in and through music can offer to individuals often considered capable of only limited musical interaction.

In my own study of Brazilian NGOs (Schmidt, in press) I found evidence of participative models as I attempted to uncover in what ways current NGO practices may inform alternative conceptualizations for an education in and through music? My experience over a three-year period of interaction with 18 NGOs in 5 Brazilian cities unearthed deep-seated cultural values placed on education. The understanding of the clear value of learning was evident, even if manifested by different means in all these sites; findings similar to those of Oliveira (2003), Kleber (2006) or Weiland (2010). Regardless of the educational orientation, NGOs in Brazil are invariably creative and disruptive, in many cases efficient, and often an educationally productive form of civic interaction. They bring cultural, social, health and educational alternatives to areas where the normalized realm of government is absent, ineffective, or insufficient, as well as in areas where innovative modes of production – including musical production – would otherwise not exist. They provide a social fabric that aids and perhaps sustains the growth of a non-formal economic force largely depend upon creative entrepreneurship (see UN Report 2010). Such entrepreneurship, I argue, simultaneously has an impact upon and is supported by educative practices that are foundational and critical, localized and global, tradition-based and innovative, comforting and risky.

The pedagogy involved in most of the projects I saw focuses on the exploration of local materials (musical and otherwise) and the transformative power of purposeful education. In other words, an education that connects students to music making by challenging them to transform their own environments (figuratively and literally), while betting that economic viability of this youth depends on their capacity for adaptation. As students construct instruments, they discuss issues of formation of timbre and texture, conceptions of ensemble and collective sound, but the practice is anchored on what I called earlier a social and culturally pertinent education, where music’s intrinsic goals are in tandem, or in fact, indistinguishable from social, communal and economic aims achieved through music making. An example local to the Revista Art Online is the work of the group Bagunçaço, which I observed in 2009. To my eyes, Bagunçaço’s innovative proposal bridges music making, environmental change and local entrepreneurship; a model that has provided visibility to the group beyond the borders of Salvador. Music has been the manner in which several of the participating youth have crossed the line between local poverty and cosmopolitanism – a juxtaposition I imagine difficult to reconcile. The opinion of a young man I met there still resonates with me, serving as a reminder of the importance of educative spaces that invite us in, that capture our attention. In his voice: “What we need, and do here is to create a space. We come here and we see that there are opportunities and we have access, you know. We start learning on our own and with the people in the group…and there is a sense of attachment that takes place.”

NGOs can offer the space where the quotidian can be ‘elevated’, bring “lived experience to status of a concept and to language” (DeNora 2000: 56). Participants of Bagunçaço seemed to be aware of this, trying to change and adapt “the homogeneity and repetitiveness of daily life” into an engagement, musical or otherwise, that points them toward “the space and agency of transformation and critique” (Roberts 2006: 67). This functions as a cultural category of the ‘everyday’ (DeNora 2000) where a “social and experiential space” is created and “relations between technology and cognition, art and labour are configured and brought to critical consciousness” (Roberts 2006: 13). What these students seem to be attempting is a space where “out of the silence and incoherence emerges an attentiveness to what remains hidden or partially disclosed or seemingly meaningless” (19).

Once NGOs are most successful in merging local understandings and networking a system that fortifies their adaptability and connects them to larger trends, they have a greater chance of impact in places where change dynamics tend to be the constant in socio-political environments; in simpler terms, where adaptability is required NGOs tend to be more efficient than government and more civic minded than corporations (United Nations 2010).³ Further, both the Finnish and the Brazilian cases present to music educators an interesting mix between pragmatic vision and innovation; an informality that makes use of formal practices when efficient dissemination is necessary, or following Charles Keil (1984), offers another representation of how innovation that is contextual continues to impact local musical practice and creativity. In all risk, critical thinking and empowerment are central, essential, but perhaps most importantly, they are ‘doable’!

Framing and Policy as Key Capacities for Musicians and Teachers

Today’s quotidian realities are abundant in images, sounds, movements and gestures, which form and delineate discourses that engender multiple meanings. How apt we are at diversely reading events, messages, ideas, curricular project, is the fundamental commodity, the essential skill. We are our capacity to frame! This is also essential to the critical formation of other indispensible values today, namely, a complex understanding of diversity, interculturality, and communicability; all foundational to democratic and socially just practices, as well as the parameters for successful economic and social growth. Further, this complexity is more and more made manifest is today’s policy envrironment.

Kenneth Boulding (1956) called attention to the formation of images people construct and how that is developed. Policy work has always depended on the capacity to conjure images, and therefore to create ‘winnable arguments’. Growingly however, policy is become more local and the need for the individual to interact and contribute to its unfolding is becoming more prominent (Weaver-Hightower 2008). When we create images for ourselves, our pedagogical aim is not to ‘convince’ or to win-over (as rational choice theorist would have us do) but rather to construct a frame that is complex but also draw us, and others, in. Here is the power of approximating teachers to policy! The key element is that the formation of a framing capacity then can lead individuals to delineate autonomy in more significant and impactful ways. We know that schools require a hierarchic structure where relationships based upon autonomy are often suppressed. And while not all schools are alike, we can assert with some confidence that schooling is differently experienced by the affluent and the impoverished (Spring 2008). The differential becomes the teacher and in these terms we can see a pedagogical approach to policy where framing, as a honed and developed skill, aids teachers to develop a complex picture of their work and the needs of the variable environs upon which they act. Teachers in high-needs environments must be educated first and foremost in their capacity to frame, to adapt, to see music in variable terms.

While this may sound complicated, this capacity to frame is integral to the most basic assumption about what constitutes a citizen or citizenship, and therefore familiar to us. The efforts of policy pedagogy are then quite simple and directed at facilitating pathways for teachers to experience a more full expression of professional citizenship. This begins of course with the grave responsibilities articulated above but also with the opportunity to frame what counts to us, and consequently change the current quantitative view of accountability.

All this leads to the consideration that the arena of policy is too significant to be left outside the main discursive capacities of educators and music educators. A continued absence from the policy arena impacts professional citizenship negatively and all but guarantees the narrow vision of teachers as ‘content managers’⁴ rather than educational actors capable of framing teaching and learning issues.

Closing Thoughts

Spaces that move us away from sequentialism and nurture a concern with agency remain available for music educators; where they can foster self- directed educational practices for themselves and their students. As shown above we can acknowledge plurality as essential in the formation of the kind of knowledge that can be creative and adaptable. In other words, thoughtful music educators can and do generate teaching that supports depth of understanding, while creatively pushing the boundaries of learned concepts—-a fundamental challenge to any educator in 21^st century.

The capacity to form frameworks—-to shape and embrace changing elements or practices while understanding their complexities, intricacies, and delicate relations—-is the indispensable ‘skill’ we must promote. This has the potential to shift music education into an larger understanding of educating through music. In the latter, an education in music, its technical aspects, are still present, but becomes secondary, as curriculum is now directed at an in-the-world challenge. In specific terms, this challenge asks that we attempt to conceptualize any musical project at the intersection between socially pertinent propositions, economically viable productions, and locally rich aims. This places our students and future music teachers as contributors to what Richard Florida has called ‘the creative society.’ Education then, is the nurturing of such capacities, hoping not for seismic transformation, but aiming at small, mindful, and recurrent shifts.

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Notes

¹ Educational adaptation can be understood as systemic disposition toward change, as Fullan explains. See Fullan, M. (2001). The new meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press.

² One avenue, only parenthetically addressed here, is a ‘north- south’ analysis of the possible impact the elements cited above – which Senge (2006) identified as characteristic of ‘profound change’ – may have upon the challenges of ‘urban’ or ‘periphery’ teaching in developed nations.

³ See also the vast diversity of civic issues addressed by UNDEF projects at http://www.undemocracyfund.org.

⁴ Content management comes from efficiency studies and often found in computing literature. A utilitarian application of these clerical notions to teaching can be found particularly in terms of classroom management. See for example, Froyen, L. A., & Iverson, A. M. (1999). Schoolwide and classroom management:  The reflective educator-leader (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.