A brave new world: theory to practice in participatory culture and music learning and teaching

ABSTRACT

The four perspectives in this paper were first presented as an interactive research/workshop symposium at RIME 9. The purpose of the symposium was to connect new media scholar Henry Jenkins’s theory of ‘participatory culture’ (1992, 2006, 2009) to possible practices of ‘participatory culture’ in diverse music teaching and learning contexts. We ask: If participatory culture exists in music learning contexts – what is it? What are its dimensions? What does participatory culture look like and mean in other music cultures and different contexts/‘places’ (e.g. online, offline, and convergent settings)? Who can and who can’t participate? How might this idea cause us to re-think some of our practices?

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory culture
• music learning and teaching
• media studies
• music curriculum
• participatory music-making
• cosmopolitan musicianship
• Irish traditional music

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Janice Waldron is an Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Roger Mantie is Associate Professor at Arizona State University. His work emphasises connections between schooling and society, with a focus on lifelong engagement in and with music and the arts. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure and the Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education.

Heidi Partti works as Acting Professor at the Faculty of Music Education, Jazz and Folk Music at Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki in Finland. She has widely published on topics such as music-related learning communities, digital technology, peer learning, collective creativity, and the development of intercultural competencies in music teacher education. She is also a coauthor of Säveltäjyyden jäljillä, a book on composing pedagogy. Heidi's website is http://www.heidipartti.com/ and she tweets @heidipartti.

Evan S. Tobias is Associate Professor at Arizona State University where he heads the Consortium for Innovation and Transformation in Music Education (CITME) http://citme.asu.edu and is Director of the Kax Herberger Center for Design, the Arts, and Young People. Evan's website is http://evantobias.net and he tweets @etobias_musiced.

Notes

1 Keil’s self-published newsletters from which these questions are taken were called the M.U.S.E. Letter.