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MayDay Group Institute: June 10 - 14, 2002:
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
"Re-forming Music Teacher Education: Recent Trends and New Directions for Foundations"


Closing session report

At the closing session of the Amherst Institute, Tom Regelski organized a panel to reflect on the week and to engage the other participants in a brief discussion of their reflections. Then, Terry Gates facilitated a listing and discussion of "action points" resulting from "breakout group" deliberations and contributed from the floor. A more complete report of discussion group deliberations will follow later. Thanks to Patrick Jones for contributing his computer record, which formed the basis for this report and the one to follow.

Panel: Lori Dolloff, Scott Goble, Liz Gould, Tom Regelski, Roger Rideout

LORI DOLLOFF

1. We need to visit each others' programs more by going into residence. If we're in town for a conference it would be good if we could spend a few days on either end with each other, so we're not working so much in isolation.

2. We need to have these types of discussion where we model the type of open mind we want our students to take on. We should meet in places where other people are so that they can see it in action. Open up the process of the collaborative dialogue so students can see the critical thinking in action.

3. We need to make more use of the MDG [listserv] to ask for help and share ideas, even as a cry for assistance to each other. This happens on the GRIME site all the time and you get lots of information back. [TOM &endash; People who are not MayDay members could also write to a MayDay member through the web site member page and ask a question.]

4. We need to really develop an intentional disposition toward mentoring each other. We too often confine mentoring toward beginning teachers and graduate students. I owe a lot to my mentors at UT. I've found mentors along the path of my career and we need to actively engage in that for and with each other.

5. We should sponsor an institute for beginning college teachers. It would establish a network of supportÉinform them of issuesÉIt would help them develop their curricular ideas and curricula in a group of mentors.


SCOTT GOBLE

A glossary on the www site would expand our vocabulary. Certain things have come out of this group such as "methodolatry" and "Nomad" that deserve wider use, and the glossary could serve as a resource for particular sources and scholars working in our field.

We should continue to broaden the input. Monique's presentation really excited me. I was thrilled to meet her and hear about her work. If we provide inspiration for us as we see what each of us, and others outside our group, can help us. Julia's presentation was another one. To hear what Julia had to say about using the tools we got in grad school to analyze what MENC is doing.

We dealt this week with foundations as if they were solid groundings. Another way of thinking about foundations is the idea of making "provisional foundations" establishing them realizing we will call them into question.

We should review our use of the term and the notion of post-modernism. The challenge is that it defines itself in the negative. Finding a new term for it is perhaps something we need to consider, perhaps borrowing one from Buddhism and other sources.

We need continual engagement and dialogue with this group. We need to critique the profession, but we also need each other's critique.

I look forward to hosting the 10th anniversary group next June in Vancouver. Come out and continue this dialogue next summer.


TOM REGELSKI

1. One strategy we might use is to approach teaching as a "problem", not a technique. We can then help teacher education students to get into the idea of teacher as change-agent or cultural mediator between segments of society...a transformative teacher.

* Push teaching as reflective practice ... intro. teaching as action research the lesson plan and curriculum is a hypothesis that gets tested in action.

* Engage students in the beginning with ideology critique and critical thinking.

* Get students "decogging" and deconstructing their own secondary socialization. Help them understand that how they were taught is at best a sample of one way of teaching through journaling and doing a personal biography all along the way.

* Give students the notion of phronesis, that teaching is an ethical act professionalising the profession ... engaging in the idea of "standards of care".

* We can get teachers to use research theory with critical intention.

* Curriculum theory is almost never done in music teacher education. Curriculum theory, with that name, might be a wonderful way of connecting social theory with teaching practice. It's not as abstract as studying philosophy of ed., sociology of ed., etc. It might resonate better with students.

2. Reform the research and theory establishment at the doctoral level. Much of it is overly narrow and focused on getting the project done. Maybe we need to do more to make our professors more well-rounded in foundational ways.

3. Change the culture to thinking about music as praxis, knowing the implications of the differences of how we think about music. The implications for teaching music as praxis are overwhelming and threatening to the "establishment", but get more students to be thinking about it.

[DAVID ELLIOTT -- One thing that helps is to have a third person reply to someone who misrepresents you in print. It would be a powerful way to implement Tom's #3. If somebody reads something somewhere that needs a reply, don't let it go by.]


LIZ GOULD

Thanks to everyone for your interest in feminism and for your right intention. I think what we are ready to do is interrogate power "relationships" I have an answer to the question Wayne posed last night: "Embody possibility."

Do what you do best and share it with us. If it's fine teaching, policy, provoking, whatever do it well and share it with us.

I request that you join GRIME send me or Roberta an email at egould@BOISESTATE.EDU or lambr@post.queensu.ca. And do queries. There are lots of people who wish to share. Embedded into feminisms is the notion of self-critique. I ask you to join because, quite frankly, change isn't going to happen if we keep asking the same questions. Start with Roberta's list.

Next summer is the Feminist Theory conference please come.


ROGER RIDEOUT

The 153-hour curriculum has been mandated by someone when we join a program. As such, I do not enter as a free person, I enter trapped. The most I can do is serve. If you read, it becomes a schizophrenic existence. So I suppose my first reaction of only two:

1. A meeting like this becomes an affirmation that, no, you are not crazy: There are other people out there who see the world this way and ask the same questions. There are other people who agree. It may be the only good that can come from an organization such as this is that it exists. It provides a place for people to escape, regroup, rethink.

2. I graduated in 1968 from a little state school in Missouri. Every faculty member there was actively engaged in the public schools as clinicians, guest conductors etc. It was expected. As I went to other schools not so provincial I began to see other views of music education and realized there were two worlds.

(a) About 80% of the schools require or expect that every MUED who was there was originally hired to do the same things.

(b) About 20% of the schools have the luxury wherein the expectation to do research, and publish or perish is expected. But those schools are preparing the next generation of professors. This creates a paradox.

The school didn't hire me to be a scholar and researcher. What they really want me to do is keep contact with the public schools and that old traditional system is there. It is a modernist curriculum. But if that 20%, and we in the MayDay Group, begin to embrace the postmodern idea, then this could change. The modernist reasons for band and general music is still to entertain K-12 students. If we succeed in convincing the population that that is not the reason music education should be, they'll say okay, pull out, and we'll have no reason to exist in Higher Education.

I think the Nomad metaphor is the strongest thing of the week. We will be disenfranchised in the postmodern world. Right now the system is so gargantuan and entrenched in the old model, that we may be standing at the end of the fault lines.

[DAVID ELLLIOTT: We need to read and consult laterally "teaching physical education as a reflective practice" and similar work from other disciplines. They are grappling with the same issues.

TOM: There's a book called "teaching as coaching".

DAVID: We're all musicians. We cannot leave that out many of us still play and compose how can we make use of that? It could be an entrée into communities.

WAYNE: Most of the reading I do today is outside of MUED. Who is this "we"? We should call into question the collective I feel threatened and trapped by the current collective.who are we including who are we excluding? One of the things that's been exciting here with MayDay is the difference that's begun to emerge, the different voices and attitudes.]


Focus for action

These were contributed from the floor in the closing session of the Amherst Institute.

* Visit each other's places.

* On the WWW create a bibliography for college studentsÉand write things ourselves to put there &endash; essays/introductions to topics.

* Don't hesitate to cry for help through the MDG listserv.

* Post a glossary on the www site.

* Organize an institute for beginning teachers.

* Join GRIME.

* Continue to invite graduate students to MDG meetings.

* Consider the topics covered from multiple perspectives - grad students, students who teach intro MUED classes and to hear from others how they use the information. Organize a dialogue and move toward agreement on things to include in an intro to MusEd course.

* Structure an intro to mus. ed. course based on reports from those teaching the courses &endash; doctoral students, young faculty members, etc.

* Put winners of Canadian paper competition on the www site. Post good graduate and upper-level undergraduate papers.

* Invite other people than caucasians &endash; people of color, for example &endash; to attend and present.

* Participate in race/gender institutes both individually and as the MDG.

* Re-envision MDG agenda/action ideals.

* Organize joint or concurrent meetings of the MDG and groups outside music education: race/gender institutes, education organizations, other arts ed. groups, philosophy (etc) societies

* Attend the CMS/ATMI/NACUSA "mega-music" conference, this September in Kansas City (see www.music.org for details).

* Place on www site for conference announcements; call for papers, etc.

* Attend the MDG colloquiums on curriculum:

* Fall 2002; Patti O'Toole is hosting one on higher education curriculum. Submit papers for how it can be improved and ideas for speakers to Patti and Terry Gates.

* June 2003; Scott Goble will host a colloquium on Pre-k12 curriculum in Vancouver.

* Attend the June 2004 MDG; reorganization meeting location TBD.

* Recommend people to join the MDG; also people outside of MusEd from education departments, other studies, etc.

* Invite detractors onto the program and let them become part of our dialogue.