Knowing Better Music Education and Epistemic Authority, Responsibility, and Ignorance

Adams, Alexander Mclean Arizona State University ProQuest Dissertations & 2026 해외박사(DDOD)

審美的 音樂敎育의 方法的 硏究

정순형 漢陽大學校 敎育大學院 1993 국내석사

IDEOLOGIES OF MUSIC EDUCATION: A PRAGMATIC, HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT "MUSIC" IN MUSIC EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES (CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE)

GOBLE, JAMES SCOTT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 1999 해외박사(DDOD)

The influx of students from diverse cultural backgrounds and the appearance of music from many different cultural traditions in the United States have raised a quandary among music educators over what music should be included in the music education curriculum of the nation's public schools. Also, support for public school music classes has been inconsistent throughout the history of the nation, since the varied and changing views held by the nation's citizens concerning the personal and societal importance of music have often made its inclusion in the curriculum difficult to justify. These two problems give rise to the question: What is the societal purpose of public school music education in the United States as an emerging post-modern society?. Applying the pragmatic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce to the forms of “musical activity” manifested in different world societies reveals these forms as a diverse cluster of community-specific behaviors or practices involving sound, each of which serves those who meaningfully participate in it as a vital means of psychosocial equilibration relative to the ideology—or ordered conception of Reality—they tacitly embody. It also reveals that awareness of the ideological particularity and the concomitant personal and societal benefit of participation in some form of “musical activity” have been obscured among United States citizens owing to certain factors stemming from the nation's constitutional separation of church and state and its embrace of democratic capitalism as its social system. The progressiveness of this obfuscation is reflected in the changing ways music educators have conceptualized “music” since the European colonization of North America began—first as a means of worship, later as a form of art, and more recently as a mere product of the human mind. Modifying music education curricula in United States public schools to introduce students gradually to different cultural forms of “musical activity” as culturally relative means of psychosocial equilibration would resolve the two problems cited above, raising public understanding of the human significance of “musical activity” and confirming the importance of public school music education for maintaining the egalitarian ideals of the nation.

Program Evaluation of Music Teacher Education in Ghana: Implications for Practice, Policy, and Research

Blankson, George The University of Mississippi ProQuest Dissertatio 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

The improvement of music teacher education programs is inevitably tied to improvement of the quality of music instruction in schools. As such, one of the essential avenues for improving educational programs is conducting regular program evaluations. Given the ever-evolving national standards for school music, along with the changing socio-cultural dynamics in Ghana, a corresponding review of the music teacher education programs is needed. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the music teacher education programs in Ghana. By overlaying the Content, Input, Process, and Product (CIPP) evaluation model as a conceptual framework, I sought the perspective of practicing music teachers. Using a concurrent mixed methods approach, I collected data primarily through a survey that featured both quantitative and qualitative measures. In addition, I reviewed the curricula and instructional materials used for music teacher education in Ghana. Results of this study indicated that while music teachers preferred practical and performance related activities, the programs emphasized theoretical and historical concepts. Practices that contributed to the success of the programs included support and commitment of faculty, experiential learning opportunities, and emphasis on African music. The lack of musical instruments, curricular misalignments, and inadequate training time were the major challenges that confronted the programs. Participants concluded that greater emphasis on practical courses would have been an added advantage to their music teaching practice. This study augments the limited research on music teacher education in Ghana; thereby informing policymakers, administrators, and music educators on how to plan, implement, and promote music education programs.

Teacher preparation, methods and materials for music education in rural and one-room schools in selected areas of the Midwest (1890--1950) (Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa)

Stover, Pamela Jo Indiana University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores the status and growth of music education in rural and one-room schools from 1890–1950, limited to English-speaking public schools in selected areas of the Midwest especially Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Chapters on teacher preparation, teaching methods and materials follow an overview of rural education. This study utilized historical methods including archival and oral history analysis. Eight one-room school students and teachers from Winnebago County, Iowa were interviewed in addition to Eunice Boardman, Judith Svengalis and Stanley Schleuter, who earned music education doctorates and attended rural or one-room schools. Photographs, ephemera, teaching licenses, exams, course notes, scrapbooks, letters, manuscripts, unpublished reports and dissertations of the time were also examined. Music was occasionally included in preparing rural teachers at county institutes, extension and correspondence courses, normal schools and colleges. Music was sometimes included on eighth grade, county and state teacher's examinations for initial certification or continuing education. Teaching methods besides the recitation were utilized in one-room schools. During the Progressive Education movement, music programs, pageants and projects were common teaching methods. In Iowa, the Choir and Phonograph Plans of Charles Fullerton were designed for rural teachers. Edgar B. Gordon pioneered vocal music radio broadcasts for Wisconsin school children. Both Fullerton and Gordon instituted rural choir festivals. Teaching materials were varied, but scarce. The Victrola, pump organ, piano and rhythm or homemade instruments were available. Innovative Victrola recordings corresponded with Fullerton's textbook. Grade books, daily schedules, standardized school regulations, written curriculum, teacher magazines and journals guided rural teachers. Early textbooks were typically glee club songbooks or graded series books, designed for trained musicians. A content analysis of eleven rural music books is included in this study. Rural school innovations such as recordings and textbooks designed for nonmusic specialists, distance education and improvements in teacher licensure continue today. Further research in rural music education should include other geographical areas and diversity in religion, language and race.

Music Teacher Education and Gert Biesta’s Three Educational Domains: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification

Jordan, Robert Curtis Teachers College, Columbia University ProQuest Dis 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation is about an approach to music teacher education that attempts to prepare pre-service music teachers to find employment while also preparing them to improve the realities of school teaching and learning for themselves and their students. Approaches to music teacher education in the United States have moved from broad one-size-fits-all approaches to specialized approaches that track music education majors into vocal, instrumental, and general music specialties. And at some universities, music teacher educators have considered what it might mean to prepare music education students for state licensure policies that favor all-encompassing licenses, (i.e., P–12 Music, and a marketplace that increasingly seeks broadly qualified teachers). To learn more about the latter approach, East Coast University’s music teacher education program was identified through purposeful selection for examination via intrinsic case study. Through snowball sampling, five faculty members were selected for teaching observations and interviews. In addition, focus groups of student and alumni (self-selected through volunteer sampling) helped develop my understanding and description of the case, and identification of a resultant, overarching theme. The research was focused through Biesta’s three domains of educational purpose beginning with the formation of research questions in each Biestian domain: qualification, socialization, and subjectification.The overarching theme presented in this dissertation involves a dualistic approach to music teacher education: East Coast University prepares music teachers with the skills to win and keep the job and to be change agents capable of improving their educational landscapes. As a result of my research and lengthy field engagement, I believe the preparation ECU music education students receive can be expressed as the tension between broad preparation and a personal orientation. It’s not a universal preparation; rather, it’s the ability to move flexibly across large educational domains, and at the same time, develop a kind of personal orientation that is connected to the particular. This connection is the particularness of who they are as teachers, their own biographies—the lives that they’ve lived, and the specifics of how they’ve lived those lives. In fact, that’s the beginning of a justice-based approach—to know oneself and to be able to work strategically within the particulars of a community. Throughout this intrinsic case study, my own pre-service and in-service teaching stories are interwoven with the participants’ stories in ways that are intended to address my positionality, contextualize the theoretical framework, and examine more deeply emergent research understandings. Recommendations are made for future research and practice, and a final personal reflection considers my still evolving approach to music teacher education and how it was influenced by this study.

A history of music in the Edmonton (Alberta) Public School System, 1882--1949

Howey, Robert John Arizona State University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

The purpose of this study was to document the history of music education in the Edmonton Public School System (EPSS) from its establishment in 1882 until 1949. The study covered the most influential antecedents of this history (the histories of music in Canada, general education in Quebec and Ontario, and music education in Ontario), and investigated the following related topics: (1) an historical overview of church, community, and school music in Edmonton from 1880–1901; (2) Northwest Territories and Alberta Department of Education normal and summer school music instruction and directions in music education; and (3) relevant events in the history of the EPSS and the city of Edmonton. The five main historical topics were as follows: (1) EPSS music education before the appointment of the first music supervisor (1882–1909); (2) EPSS music education from the music supervisors' perspectives (1909–49); (3) music curriculum in the EPSS; (4) high school music programs; and (5) EPSS system-wide projects in music education: Piano Class Teachers' Association, EPSS participation in the Alberta Musical Festival and EPSS Festival, string teaching and the Edmonton Public Schools Orchestra, the Edmonton Schoolboys' Band, and school radio broadcasts. Two of the main figures in the history were James Norman Eagleson, who was employed as music supervisor from 1912–49 and regarded as one of Canada's leading music educators, and Thomas Vernon Newlove, who founded the Edmonton Schoolboys' Band in 1935. This band was considered one of the best and largest of its kind in Canada until the early 1950s. Only a relatively small number of historical research projects have been undertaken on music education in Canada. This study is one of the first to document the history of music education in a Western Canadian school system.

Designing Our Own Path, Telling Our Own Stories: Using DesiCrit for Education to Examine First-Generation Indian-American Identities and Experiences in Music Education

Menon, Saleel Adarkar Michigan State University ProQuest Dissertations & 2025 해외박사(DDOD)

First-Generation Indian-American (FGIA) students and educators remain largely invisible in music education scholarship, often subsumed under monolithic Asian American categories that fail to capture their complex racialization, cultural hybridity, and transnational realities (Cayari, 2021; Palkki et al., 2024). Existing literature on music education continues to privilege whiteness and Western classical traditions, erasing diasporic perspectives and undervaluing the cultural wealth that FGIA communities bring to music learning (Hess, 2021; Sanchez-Gatt et al., 2025; Yosso, 2005). In this study, I addressed these absences by centering FGIA voices and theorizing conditions that support their persistence in music education using DesiCrit for Education (DCE), a theoretical lens I developed that extends DesiCrit (Harpalani, 2013) and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023) to account for caste, hybridity, and anti-colonial resistance.The purpose of this study was to explore how FGIA music educators navigate their educational and professional trajectories, and what factors enable their persistence in a field that often marginalizes their identities. Specifically, I asked: (1) How do FGIA educators recall their K-12 music experiences? (2) How do family, community, and out-of-school contexts shape their participation in music education? (3) How do higher education programs influence their career decisions? and (4) What factors support their persistence in the music education profession?Using a qualitative case study design (Yin, 2018), I examined the experiences of four FGIA music educators. Data included semi-structured interviews (Roulston, 2010), focus groups (Krueger, 2014), and researcher reflexive journaling (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016. I coded data iteratively through constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 2014), with the tenets of DCE guiding both thematic development and interpretation. Reflexivity served as an ethical anchor in this process, allowing me to interrogate my inbetweener positionality (Milligan, 2016) and resist imposing my frameworks onto participants' stories.Analysis revealed that FGIA educators experienced music education as a site of both belonging and marginalization. Participants' narratives illuminated nonlinear musical pathways shaped by negotiations of cultural hybridity, intergenerational dynamics, and the pressures of racialization in predominantly white spaces. Their persistence was relational and collective, sustained by mentors, identity-affirming communities, and critical moments of reframing success. Participants described how they strategically navigated assimilationist expectations while simultaneously cultivating resistance to cultural erasure. From these findings, I developed a conceptual model of FGIA persistence in music education, which delineates five interrelated domains: affirming hybridity as a pedagogical resource, fostering social belonging, redefining success beyond assimilationist logics, supporting the development of critical consciousness, and creating identity-affirming spaces. This model offers researchers a lens for understanding persistence as more than individual resilience; it highlights the structural, relational, and cultural conditions that may make persistence possible.I suggest both theoretical and practical implications of this work. I advanced DCE as an analytic framework capable of representing the racialized and diasporic realities of FGIA educators, offering tools for future research across minoritized groups in music education and beyond. Practically, these findings call on PK-12 teachers to create classroom environments that affirm hybridity and resist tokenism, teacher educators to model anti-colonial pedagogy and build affinity spaces, and researchers to embrace reflexive methodologies that center minoritized voices. Ultimately, I found FGIA persistence as a collective and culturally situated process, grounded in relationships, identity affirmation, and resistance to systemic erasure. Centering FGIA voices challenges music education to move beyond superficial diversity toward practices that sustain and empower.

Perspectives From Three Points in the Collegiate Experience for Music Educators of Color

DeAngelis, David R Northwestern University ProQuest Dissertations & T 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

This multi-study dissertation establishes a line of inquiry into collegiate experiences of prospective music teachers of color by investigating three key moments: graduation, deciding to leave the major, and planning where to work. Exploring each of these moments via three different empirical methods (secondary data analysis, collective case study, and critical quantitative inquiry) allowed for examining these questions from multiple perspectives to develop a more comprehensive understanding of issues of racial diversity and equity among music educators. In the first study, I gathered data from IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data Service) as well as from manually contacting colleges to create a demographic profile of recent graduates with bachelor's degrees in music education. In the second study, I explored issues of collegiate attrition by interviewing seven former music education students of color who left their music education collegiate programs. Finally, in the third study, I examined employment preferences of preservice music teachers by surveying collegiate music education students at HBCUs, HSIs, PWIs, and large diverse universities using a Sawtooth Software Adaptive Conjoint Analysis survey.Paper 1: Recent College Graduates With Bachelor's Degrees in Music Education: A Demographic ProfileThe purpose of this study was to examine demographics of graduates with bachelor's degrees in music education to better understand the collegiate pipeline for music teachers of color. White overrepresentation has been observed throughout the music education profession, but the field lacks a large-scale demographic profile for recent college graduates in music education. Using data collected from 565 institutions reporting music education graduates in IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Data System) as well as 40 additional schools, 29,869 students graduated with bachelor's degrees in music education between 2011 and 2018; 81% were White, 7% were Hispanic/Latino, 4% were Black/African American, 2% were Asian, 0.5% were American Indian/Native Alaskan, 0.1% were Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 2% identified as two or more races. In addition, HBCUs and HSIs comprised only 5% and 6%, respectively, of schools in this data set, yet accounted for almost 1/3 of all Black and 1/4 of all Latino music education graduates.Paper 2: Attrition of Music Education Students of Color: A Collective Case StudyIn this study, I examined experiences of former music education students of color who left their undergraduate programs to develop a more nuanced understanding of the pipeline into-or out of-the music teaching profession. Previous research in music education has examined both the collegiate experiences of students of color and student attrition generally; what is missing, however, are the perspectives of students of color who left their programs and their reasons for no longer pursuing careers as music teachers. To explore these questions, I interviewed seven former music education students of color from different universities.Guided by a theoretical framework of Museus' (2014) Culturally Engaging Campus Environment (CECE), three main themes emerged: first, the collegiate experience was characterized by a web of (dis)connections. Dimensions central to participants' experiences, curriculum, faculty, peers, auditions, ensembles, and institutional policies, were either connections that strengthened their relationship to the institution or disconnections that weakened their relationship. Second, participants encountered financial limitations specific to the music education major in a variety of ways not covered by financial aid. Third, participants engaged in a process of negotiating their own racial identities with, or against, the dominant norms of their respective institutions.Paper 3: Employment Preferences of Preservice Music Teachers: A Critical Quantitative AnalysisMusic teacher employment preferences have been examined previously using large-scale data sets and surveys. Demographics for these studies, however, have been overwhelmingly White; lost may have been the perspectives of music teachers of color. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to examine employment preferences for preservice music educators using a critical quantitative approach. Using a similar method as in Robinson's (2012) survey of preservice music teachers, but with modifications in attributes and sampling, I designed an adaptive conjoint analysis (ACA) survey through Sawtooth Statistical Software to survey collegiate music education majors at HBCUs, HSIs, PWIs, and large diverse universities.Overall, the two most important employment attributes for preservice music teachers were (a) teaching in a welcoming environment and (b) teaching in their area of musical expertise. Least important attributes were (a) student socioeconomic status, and (b) student race/ethnicity. Across participant subgroups, preservice music teachers were found to be mostly similar in their preferences, but with the following key differences. First, for those with student teaching experience, working in schools with excellent facilities and resources was more important, while student race/ethnicity was less important. Second, for Black preservice music teachers, student race/ethnicity was more important than for other teachers. Specifically, Black preservice music teachers indicated a significantly higher preference for working in schools with predominantly Black students, elevating student race/ethnicity to the third most employment important factor for Black teachers when considering a future job. Finally, although teaching in a welcoming school environment was the most important factor for preservice music teachers overall, it was of even greater importance for trans and gender expansive music teachers.

The Historical Exclusion of Mexican Americans in Music Education

Mena, Christopher University of Washington ProQuest Dissertations & 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

This historical study explores Mexican American student access to music education programs during the four main periods of Mexican American educational experience identified by Chicano education history scholar Gilbert G. Gonzalez (2013): de jure segregation (1900-1950), the inter-American period (1950-1965), the militant and reformist era (1965-1975), and the neoliberal era of education (1975 to present). This is in an effort to illuminate the influence of U. S. educational policy on Mexican American access to music education programs. Using Critical Race Theory (Taylor, 2016), I explore the intersection of educational policy and local practice to describe how Mexican American students were impacted in terms of full access to music education programs throughout the American Southwest. Additionally, I will explore Mexican American community responses to provide music education to students in each era in an effort to provide counter-stories (Yosso & Solorzano, 2016) of successful music programs that were developed in Mexican American communities. These counter-stories have the potential to help inform current music educators of effective strategies to create appealing music programs at sites with high Mexican American student populations.The current underrepresentation of Mexican American teachers (Elpus, 2015) and students (Elpus & Abril, 2019) in music education warrants a deep historical exploration of the various factors that have influenced the participation trajectory of Mexican American individuals over several generations. Using Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1980; Ladson-Billings, 2016; Sleeter, 2012) as an appropriate theoretical framework, this research examines the intersection of educational policy and local practice with attention to the dynamics of power and oppression within these educational systems as well as how individuals are able to successfully navigate these spaces using culturally congruent approaches (Au & Kawakami, 1994) in music education.The findings of this historical study reflect current strategies of Ethnic Studies scholars in engaging Mexican American youth using Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial pedagogies as a way to counteract the effects of an education system rooted in colonialism. Additionally, the counter-stories presented suggest that community music-making was historically the primary mode of music education for Mexican American students who were excluded from participating in mainstream music education settings. As such, I recommend the development of music programs that are rooted in 1) Indigenous epistemologies, 2) decolonial pedagogies, and 3) community cultural wealth. To accomplish this goal, I present a music framework based on the Mexica knowledge construct process known as the Nahui Ollin. To move this framework into practice, I also outline a music composition approach that is rooted in Indigenous knowledge (the Collective Songwriting Process) and can be used as the foundation for engagement of Mexican-heritage students. While my suggestions focus solely on this framework's use in school music programs with high populations of Mexican American students, they can be implemented in any school music program that is seeking to implement decolonial practices.