XV Colloquium: June 10 - 12, 2004:
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
"Music for Life: Re-visioning Music Education as a Part of General/Comprehensive Schooling"

Music Educators at the Tertiary Level: A Secret Society? Thoughts about Our Profession
Hildegard Froehlich

It has become popular to encourage teachers in compulsory education to engage in action research and systematic self-examination of their work. It may be time for us to heed our own advice and direct the same kind of action research toward our own work. Using the term "secret society" as a metaphor for perceived exclusion as well as ambiguous purpose, my question is not whether we fit the criteria of a secret society but whether the criteria can describe how others view us, a question that resulted from exploring characteristics of my own profession, that of music educator in higher education, from the perspective of symbolic interaction theory (Froehlich, 1999, 2000, 2002a, b, c). Generally, secret societies are said to be more concerned with themselves and their own well-being than with the well-being of those whom they claim to serve. If we came across that way to others, it would be quite possible that our desire to create a new music instructional for everyone else can and may be viewed with suspicion, caution, and concern by those who are to be the recipients of such reform. I suggest that the focus of our research and scholarship should be self-examination rather than telling our colleagues in primary and secondary schools how to teach in environments largely unlike our own. Systematic introspection by way of procedures commonly ascribed to critical and reflective praxis therefore should become our main concern as it would have the potential of making us models of what we preach. We would open ourselves up to criticism of our teaching, not just our research.