{"id":7398,"date":"2022-03-01T16:03:11","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T15:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/?page_id=7398"},"modified":"2022-05-09T17:37:38","modified_gmt":"2022-05-09T16:37:38","slug":"ispme-newsletters","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/ispme-newsletters\/","title":{"rendered":"ISPME Newsletters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><H1>Newsletters published from ISPME since 2021<\/H1><br \/>\n<BL><br \/>\n<UL><H2>Newsletter February 2022 <\/H2><\/UL><br \/>\n<H4>Dialogue between Dan Shevock and Austin Showen<\/H4><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Welcome to what we hope will be the first<br \/>\nof many discussions where we place two voices together in order to frame issues<br \/>\nto which music educators are drawn. Within each newsletter we will be asking<br \/>\nmusic education philosophers throughout our international community to dialogue<br \/>\nwith us and with each other in ways that manifest both the theoretical and the<br \/>\npedagogical. Realizing that our first two guests are from North America it\u2019s<br \/>\nimportant to note that they were chosen as they have both published in PMER or<br \/>\npresented at an ISPME conference on issues that bring music education and<br \/>\necological concerns together; an issue that is of dire importance to all of us.<br \/>\nKetil Thorgersen, however, (<\/span><span lang=SV style='color:black'>Stockholms<br \/>\nMusikpedagogiska Institute)<\/span><span lang=EN-CA style='color:black'>, who<br \/>\nhas also been challenging us to consider these issues, <\/span><span lang=EN-CA>will<br \/>\nbe responding to this dialogue in our June newsletter. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/br><br \/>\nHere are the links to their essays that they wrote to initiate this conversation:<br \/>\n<BL><br \/>\n<UL>Dan Shevock&#8217;s essay is <a href=\"https:\/\/ispme.net\/temp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Dan.teach-for-ecological.pdf\">here<\/a><\/UL><br \/>\n<UL>Austin Showen&#8217;s essay is <a href=\"https:\/\/ispme.net\/temp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Austin.500-words-for-ISMPE.pdf\"> here<\/a><\/UL><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Thus, we welcome Dan Shevock and Austin<br \/>\nShowen. Each of them has been thinking and writing about the ways music<br \/>\neducators need to be more mindful about our responsibilities, our connections\u2014our<br \/>\nentanglements, as it were\u2014to and with the natural world. We invited each of<br \/>\nthem to write a short response addressing the broad guiding prompt: How are we<br \/>\ncomplicit, what role have we played, and in what ways can our pedagogical<br \/>\nchoices either reproduce, or interrogate the environmental disasters of this<br \/>\nworld? After having a chance to read what the other wrote they came together in<br \/>\ndialogue. What follows is an edited version of that hour dialogue.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: Austin and Dan, thank you again for<br \/>\ntaking the time to help us with what I believe might not be something that many<br \/>\nof us consider in our day-to-day practices. Perhaps this meeting can help our<br \/>\nfield move more quickly to embrace the kinds of issues that both of you have<br \/>\nbeen raising for quite a while.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>I would love to hear both of you chat<br \/>\nbriefly about why this topic, and why it&#8217;s important to you as scholars and<br \/>\nhuman beings, and why should the rest of us be interested in these ways of<br \/>\nbeing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin:  Sure. First of all, to me it&#8217;s an<br \/>\nethical call to be responsible for the children, and people we teach. To be<br \/>\naware of what kind of world they&#8217;re born into and what kind of world we prepare<br \/>\nthem for. I think back to the ways that we&#8217;ve done music for the past couple hundreds<br \/>\nof years and how that does not fit in with contemporary realities of climate; the<br \/>\nways we think about music was for a different world then the one we have now. And<br \/>\nso, I am suggesting that we want to move away from thinking of things as enclosed<br \/>\nand bounded.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy:  I think that is a beautiful opening<br \/>\nand I&#8217;m imagining Dan is right there with you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Dan: I think it&#8217;s wonderful that we are two<br \/>\nmusic teachers sitting here in Appalachia, the oldest mountains in the world with<br \/>\nsister mountains in North Africa, split apart millions of years ago. So here we<br \/>\nare sitting in a place under attack from resource extractions of all kinds,<br \/>\nincluding fracking. The people who make money from this are sitting in a distance<br \/>\ncity. And as Austin said, for 200 years music education has been a dissecting\u2014not<br \/>\nan ecological\u2014 venture and music education philosophy has been the opposite of ecology.<br \/>\nJust as one might take a frog and throw its carcass onto a table and cut out<br \/>\nbody parts. That&#8217;s what music education has been. And yet we came into a world<br \/>\nthat had something like music education for 200,000 years since we evolved into<br \/>\n<i>Homo sapiens<\/i>. There has been music education long before we started dissecting<br \/>\nthe natural world and the more than human world, that did not privilege humans<br \/>\nabove all other species in all situations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: Both of you in your own ways<br \/>\nreferred to this idea of the way we have done music.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>All of us reading are drawn to<br \/>\nphilosophical conversations but my wonderment is whether and how these<br \/>\nphilosophical arguments operationalize in people&#8217;s pedagogy. How does your<br \/>\nthinking on these issues operationalize in your own contexts and your own<br \/>\nteaching? This is powerful because you both have had experiences at the tertiary<br \/>\nlevel and in public schools with younger students. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Dan: One way I begin is to consider Dr.<br \/>\nBoyce Tillman and her suggestion that we find out where the materials in our<br \/>\nclassrooms come from. We track those down; are the tonewoods we are using (for<br \/>\ninstance) destroying real communities of life &#8211; people and non-human animals<br \/>\nand ecosystems in the global south? What is the ecological cost of this<br \/>\nChromebook, what is the ecological cost of this dulcimer, what&#8217;s the ecological<br \/>\ncost of the paper were using, what&#8217;s the ecological cost of every item? But<br \/>\nalso, what are the ecological benefits and how do these things root me into a<br \/>\nplace?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>All of this is just part of consciousness<br \/>\nraising as part of a music educator\u2019s job; consciousness raising on ecosystems<br \/>\nis one part of consciousness raising on issues of racism, gender inequality, and<br \/>\nableism, for instance. All of these are things we must become aware of, things<br \/>\nthat are hidden from us, that we affect with \u2018normal\u2019 everyday actions, micro<br \/>\naggressions, \u2018right\u2019 ways that we speak, ways that we buy, ways that we act<br \/>\nevery day, and every single moment. Music education has a place in that grander<br \/>\nconsciousness raising effort of education; it has a place in our survival as a<br \/>\nspecies on this planet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: I know that Austin will be happy to<br \/>\nenter this conversation because he&#8217;s been thinking about these issues,<br \/>\nparticularly the wooden bars on Orff instruments, so again, the intersections<br \/>\nbetween your work is profound.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: I approach things a little bit<br \/>\ndifferently. I would like to help students, especially the ones I have who are<br \/>\nin music teacher education, to reconsider how we <i>are<\/i> in music, what our<br \/>\nrelationship <i>is<\/i> to music, how music relates us to place, and to the<br \/>\nworld, and to all the beings and material processes that go into what we do. And<br \/>\nso, I like to pose questions pretty early on, asking them to consider why we do<br \/>\nwhat we do; can we think about other ways of engaging musically rather than our<br \/>\ntypical performance modes of doing things in specially designed buildings? What<br \/>\ndo we think music is and does? I have recently been tying that to work in<br \/>\nritual studies, which does go into some issues of spirituality, also bringing<br \/>\nin Indigenous perspectives on the ontology of music. So, there is a life and<br \/>\nvitality to music. But I, like you Dan, want to help students inquire and be<br \/>\ncurious about the material impact of the ways we do things in the classroom. I<br \/>\nwas just talking about this yesterday with students: these are the Orff bars<br \/>\nsitting on your table, where did these come from. And then they look up what rosewood<br \/>\nis on Wikipedia and say, \u201cOh, actually, it&#8217;s destroying tropical forests when<br \/>\nwe harvest rosewood.\u201d But <i>they<\/i> are the ones coming to these realizations.<br \/>\nSo, I don&#8217;t know that I would say it was a matter of consciousness raising. I&#8217;m<br \/>\nthinking of Hannah Arendt in the Crisis in Education where she&#8217;s talking about preparing<br \/>\nchildren for the renewal of a common world and how that is not something that<br \/>\nwe can accomplish for someone. But rather how we need to remain open to a<br \/>\nfuture that we can&#8217;t currently possibly imagine. I think maybe it also has to<br \/>\ndo with a different relationship to time. Do our current music making practices<br \/>\ncontinue the timeline of progress, or do we interrupt that and insert<br \/>\nalternative temporalities is in music making. How can we disrupt the ways that<br \/>\nfossil fuels support our performances? I&#8217;m interested in how music can become a<br \/>\nway for us to enact the world otherwise performatively. All these issues are<br \/>\nimportant here; there&#8217;s no such thing as extra musical to me and that&#8217;s one<br \/>\nthing I think we need to reconsider. But a deep rethinking and your connection<br \/>\nto deep time Dan, that\u2019s really powerful to think about, if we take a much<br \/>\nbroader perspective on what has music making meant and has been for the earth, or<br \/>\nthe cosmos, that might help us to reorient and disrupt the linear progress<br \/>\ntemporality.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: I appreciate this discussion because<br \/>\nit&#8217;s impacting how I think about my own pedagogy. However, I continue to be<br \/>\ndrawn to the ethical implications: Do we continue to allow our students to play<br \/>\nOrff instruments once they&#8217;ve grappled with this? How do you balance these<br \/>\nissues? Once you have this conversation, but then say okay let\u2019s engage with<br \/>\nthe Orff process, is there a disconnect there?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: We do play them. I could leave all<br \/>\nthe instruments and things in their cabinets and closets, but that doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\nreally do anything for me. Me just pretending that the Orff instruments aren&#8217;t<br \/>\nthere; I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s pedagogically valuable. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: But you&#8217;re teaching them that it&#8217;s<br \/>\nan option. Every time they engage with these instruments and experience the<br \/>\nseductiveness of them, you&#8217;re presenting this is an option they can take in<br \/>\ntheir own future contexts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Dan: Austin is talking about progress and<br \/>\nif you look at the first three Western thinkers to write about ecology, Rachel<br \/>\nCarson, Murray Bookchin and Ivan Illich, all three of them wrote back in the<br \/>\n50s what we would consider philosophically ecology today and were well known<br \/>\nfor critiquing progress. So that critique of progress connected to the<br \/>\necological sustainability, ecological regeneration, these have been paired conversations<br \/>\nfrom the start; for 70 years now of ecological philosophy. Rachel Carson&#8217;s<br \/>\nwritings were foundational to the deep ecology movement, which was really the<br \/>\nfirst philosophical school for the environmental movement through the 70s with Arne<br \/>\nN\u00e6ss, the Norwegian philosopher. Vandana Shiva is still doing her work on deep<br \/>\necology as eco-feminism. Ecology and place conscious education has also been<br \/>\ninseparable. With all things connected, if we return to the question that Cathy<br \/>\nasked, Orff instruments specifically have a history \u2013 and their history has<br \/>\nalways been something \u201cof school.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Is it the purpose of school to have<br \/>\nstudents learn things that are for school, and for nothing else? For me, that<br \/>\nseems to be connected to teaching students an ethic of waste. This is something<br \/>\nwe do here, and we will never do it again. This goes back to progressive<br \/>\neducation and knocking down the walls between the classroom and society. You<br \/>\nknow, it&#8217;s one thing to have students go make their own Orff instruments, to go<br \/>\nand find materials in a local park and come back and make them. It&#8217;s quite<br \/>\nanother to go and purchase them, especially knowing that the rosewood comes<br \/>\nfrom felled trees. Whereas the original marimba rosewood came from old railroad<br \/>\nties. These were more sustainable production practices that have now been<br \/>\ntransformed into industries that are not sustainable. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>So, when I see the Appalachian dulcimer, I<br \/>\nknow this is an instrument that they can continue playing their whole life. They<br \/>\ncan go and make an instrument, or they can buy one, take care of it their whole<br \/>\nlife, and it&#8217;ll take care of them musically their whole life. They can sing<br \/>\nwith it to their children; it\u2019s an instrument with a history and with a future.<br \/>\nAt my school I use Orff instruments because they&#8217;re there, but I see them as<br \/>\npart of an ethic of waste. Just one part of an ethic of waste to have things<br \/>\nthat are specifically for \u201cschool,\u201d and nowhere else. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: What&#8217;s interesting to me with the Orff<br \/>\ninstruments is that I would challenge the claim that the Schulwerk and elemental<br \/>\nmusic, was developed in a school context. This is not quite right, because what<br \/>\nCarl Orff, <\/span><span lang=EN-CA style='font-family:\"Times New Roman\",serif'>Dorothee<br \/>\nGunther <\/span><span lang=EN-CA>and Gunild Keetman were doing originally wasn&#8217;t<br \/>\nreally aimed at school age kids. It&#8217;s the ethic of waste, however, that is<br \/>\nstriking me, and I see where you&#8217;re going with that, especially in the ways instruments<br \/>\nare currently produced. But historically there were other issues that could<br \/>\ncontest current practices with Orff. During the war, for instance, they were<br \/>\nmaking instruments out of local materials. They used old cabinets and scrap wood<br \/>\nbasically to make them because everything basically got destroyed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Dan: It would be a different thing if today<br \/>\nOrff teachers acted in that spirit and collected wood and made instruments,<br \/>\nlike Satis Coleman\u2019s students did in the 1920s; that would be a completely<br \/>\ndifferent thing. But it still wouldn&#8217;t have a post school life. Are you going<br \/>\nto take this home and play it, keep it, use it, reuse it? The postmodern R\u2019s\u2014reduce,<br \/>\nreuse, recycle, with reduce as the best, reuse as second best\u2014well, we can<br \/>\nreuse certain instruments outside of school, beyond school. Even a clarinet can<br \/>\nfind its way into a klezmer band somewhere and have a life that lasts longer<br \/>\nthan its time as a school instrument. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: But I think that this is what Austin<br \/>\nmight be trying to suggest. One finds themselves in a school that&#8217;s inherited<br \/>\nOrff instruments. Orff instruments, if taken care of, can last a very, very<br \/>\nlong time. The problem that I have with too many teachers is that Orff has been<br \/>\ncodified into a way of making music that does not have a post school life. If<br \/>\nwe can recognize how our pedagogical engagements are tied to a set of<br \/>\ninstruments and have conversations with our students, we will perhaps vow not<br \/>\nto buy new ones and those that we do have will be taken care of as part of our<br \/>\ncommunity. I&#8217;ve inherited them, I&#8217;m not going to throw them out on the street.<br \/>\nI am however going to figure out music making processes\/engagements that I can<br \/>\nfacilitate that do have post life, long term music making implications. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: That is what I would like to think about,<br \/>\nand I would want to definitely think about materials and materiality in a very<br \/>\nconcrete way. But also thinking about this same issue: If we just change the instruments<br \/>\nwe\u2019re using to be sustainable, and then we keep on doing the same musical<br \/>\npractices, that&#8217;s also problematic. So musically, performatively, and<br \/>\npedagogically considering what that also might mean. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Dan: I feel in my time teaching since 1997,<br \/>\nwhen I graduated with my first degree, that music education has become more<br \/>\nnarrow and more codified. Orff was a thing you did to add a couple different<br \/>\nideas to your eclectic curriculum in the 1990s. If you were around North<br \/>\nAmerica in the 90s you remember that term eclectic curriculum. That was the<br \/>\nstandard &#8211; the eclectic music educator. Today it&#8217;s not so much. Narrowing is part<br \/>\nof the pedagogical challenge right now in North America. Somehow, we can have<br \/>\npeople learn music from Africa and never even learn the basic fact of the<br \/>\necological knowledge systems that are embedded in many of the musics of Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: What all of us are saying in our own<br \/>\nways is that our pedagogy is always already intertwined with these issues. That&#8217;s<br \/>\nwhy I would like you to talk about entanglements, so perhaps Austin you can<br \/>\njump in. Because it seems that we&#8217;re all arguing the problematics of<br \/>\ncodification, and the problematics of pedagogical engagements that are not more<br \/>\nhumanely grounded and connected to the issues you are both raising. Austin did you<br \/>\nwant to talk about that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: Sure. <\/span><span lang=EN-CA\nstyle='color:black'>What I&#8217;m thinking right now about entanglements, and<br \/>\nespecially drawing on Karen Barad, is indeterminacy and complementarity in<br \/>\nquantum physics. Barad reminds us that for a scientist like Heisenberg, for<br \/>\nexample, the weirdness of quantum physics comes down to the limits of our&nbsp;<i>knowledge<\/i>:<br \/>\nyou can know either the position of a particle or its velocity, but not both at<br \/>\nthe same time. The knowability of one variable is entangled in a complementary<br \/>\nrelation with the uncertainty of the other. But on this account,<br \/>\ncomplementarity is merely an epistemological limitation rather than an<br \/>\nontological condition. Barad allows us to see, by way of Niels Bohr\u2019s<br \/>\ninterpretation of quantum physics, that entanglements and complementarity<br \/>\nreveal not just epistemological uncertainty but&nbsp;<i>ontological<br \/>\nindeterminacy<\/i>&nbsp;at the heart of matter. In Barad\u2019s words, \u201cdeterminacy,<br \/>\nas materially enacted in the very constitution of a phenomenon, always entails<br \/>\nconstitutive exclusions (that which must remain indeterminate)\u201d (2012, 7).<br \/>\nThinking ecologically, then, and in terms of what might be entangled with our<br \/>\nmusic making processes, means recognizing that what comes to matter through our<br \/>\nmusical performances necessarily excludes other ways of being from mattering;<br \/>\nand that our music making has real, material consequences that we cannot always<br \/>\nforesee or determine for ourselves.&nbsp;<\/span><span lang=EN-CA>&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: Dan did you want to jump in before<br \/>\nwe wrap this up?<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 style='margin:0cm'><span lang=EN-CA style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:\nTimes;font-weight:normal'>&nbsp;<\/span><\/h2>\n<h2 style='margin:0cm'><span lang=EN-CA style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:\nTimes;font-weight:normal'>Dan: The Buddhist monk Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, passed<br \/>\naway this week. He had a saying<\/span><span lang=EN-CA style='font-size:12.0pt;\nfont-family:Times'> <\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>that we should walk as if you are kissing<br \/>\nthe earth with your feet. I feel like when it comes to entanglements that music<br \/>\neducators could do well to walk as if we are kissing the earth with our feet,<br \/>\nwith our pedagogy. So, we are entangled with these things. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>I think Satis Coleman, with whatever<br \/>\nstudents Columbia University threw her way, wouldn&#8217;t have started off lectures saying,<br \/>\n\u201cHow is music human-only?\u201d There are scientists with PhDs who spend their whole<br \/>\nlife studying whale songs. But so many music educators have to come in with the<br \/>\nhubris to say that these scientists are stupid and that we know better because<br \/>\nmusic is human-only. This isn&#8217;t walking with your feet kissing the earth. This<br \/>\nis stomping in, with real hubris, real grandiose \u201cwe are the humans.\u201d We talk<br \/>\nabout religions. This hubris doesn&#8217;t line up with Thomas Merton or, Dorothy Day\u2019s<br \/>\nChristianity. It doesn&#8217;t go with any of the deep thinkers of any religion that I<br \/>\nknow. But it\u2019s like a religious thing for music educators to believe that music<br \/>\nis a human thing, regardless of everything around us that tells us differently.<br \/>\nHow do we not even look to our chickadee older brothers who have been musicking<br \/>\nfor beauty, mating, and for war, and all the things that we music for also, for<br \/>\nmillions of years, in our music classroom? We&#8217;ve had to work so hard to<br \/>\ndisentangle what&#8217;s already entangled.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><b><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy<\/span><\/b><span lang=EN-CA>: One<br \/>\nof the things I\u2019m wondering for you, Dan, and this leads me to my final<br \/>\nquestion, to what does the international community need to commit? You&#8217;re<br \/>\nasking us to commit to a very different kind of humility. We do some things so<br \/>\nwell but walking with our feet kissing the earth is probably not one of them. My<br \/>\nquestion is, then, when we present this discussion to our colleagues throughout<br \/>\nthe world to what should we be asking all of us to commit? <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><b><span lang=EN-CA>Dan<\/span><\/b><span lang=EN-CA>: I think<br \/>\nour first commitment should focus on the fact that we&#8217;ve had 100 years of<br \/>\nsomething like world music, something like multicultural music, something like<br \/>\nnon-Western music. You can look at the old books from the 1920s and you can<br \/>\neven make fun of how badly they did \u201cmusic around the world.\u201d And then you<br \/>\ncould look at the ones from the 80s and see how badly, and you could look at<br \/>\nthe ones today, if you have enough insight, and see how badly we&#8217;re still doing<br \/>\nit. But the reason we do it so badly is because we&#8217;re always trying to flatten the<br \/>\ndiverse, the multiple. If there&#8217;s a rule of ecology, it&#8217;s persistent diversity,<br \/>\nnot just diversity of appearance. It&#8217;s embedded deep at the core of the way<br \/>\nthat people think about the world. So, I think that we should have leadership<br \/>\ncoming from around the globe. We could think about the things that <\/span><span\nlang=EN-CA style='font-family:\"Times New Roman\",serif'>Koji Matsunobu <\/span><span\nlang=EN-CA>uncovered about <\/span><i><span lang=EN-CA style='font-family:\"Times New Roman\",serif'>shakuhachi<\/span><\/i><span\nlang=EN-CA> and think about the whole musical process that begins with<br \/>\nmeditating in a bamboo forest and finding a unique instrument, not as a reproducible<br \/>\none, but one that is in some way a different size and shape than every other <\/span><i><span\nlang=EN-CA style='font-family:\"Times New Roman\",serif'>shakuhachi<\/span><\/i><span\nlang=EN-CA> flute that&#8217;s ever been made. And then becoming an expert on that,<br \/>\nthe particular. And truly getting into it and knowing that the history of the <\/span><span\nlang=EN-CA style='font-family:\"Times New Roman\",serif'>shakuhachi<\/span><span\nlang=EN-CA> and a way that represents the wind through the bamboo groves. Or<br \/>\nanother instrument from Japan, the <i>biwa<\/i>, and how it&#8217;s supposed to sound<br \/>\nlike the cicadas who each year come and make their sound; a rhythm that produces<br \/>\na broader sense of time, a beat that emerges once a year. The cicadas spend<br \/>\nmost of their lives underneath the earth, getting prepared to make their music.<br \/>\nAnd if you truly take non-Western cultures on even footing with the West you<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t have to peg non-Western ways of thought into a Western concept. You can<br \/>\nbegin by exploring, knowing that no one in the class is going to come to a full<br \/>\nunderstanding as if somebody had lived there their whole life, or like a cicada<br \/>\nliving underground and coming out to make its music; or somebody who was taught<br \/>\n<\/span><i><span lang=EN-CA style='font-family:\"Times New Roman\",serif'>biwa<\/span><\/i><span\nlang=EN-CA> from the early childhood.<\/span><span lang=EN-CA style='font-family:\n\"Times New Roman\",serif'> <\/span><span lang=EN-CA>But there is something that<br \/>\nwe can have. There&#8217;s a gift that has been given, from other beings, a way of<br \/>\nthinking that then produces what I&#8217;ve called eco-literate citizens. An eco-literate<br \/>\ncitizen is someone who has a variety of ways of thinking about what it is to<br \/>\nlive sustainably and regeneratively. It&#8217;s not someone who takes the standard<br \/>\nstory that they&#8217;re fed in school about the world being ours to waste, the world<br \/>\nis ours to destroy, to use, to consume, and school is there so we can make some<br \/>\nmoney and get a better job and live in suburbia. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: Austin do add your thinking on this<br \/>\nand our commitment to what we should be doing as an international community.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: I would like to ask us to consider what<br \/>\nkind of worlds we enact performatively in the ways that we make and teach<br \/>\nmusic. And that requires deep thinking and consideration and not quick action.<br \/>\nFor instance, if I want to reconsider the ways that I engage and teach music, I<br \/>\ncan&#8217;t just make that happen tomorrow. I like that you brought up the gift<br \/>\nbecause I&#8217;ve been thinking about whether our real relationship to music,<br \/>\nwhatever that means, is often one of taking, and appropriation, ownness. And if<br \/>\nour musical practices are reoriented toward gratitude and generosity this connects<br \/>\nto what I was trying to find a way to argue in my 500-word essay. But for me<br \/>\nwhere the ritual kind of thinking comes in is considering what if instead of<br \/>\nthe accumulation of knowledge, or whether we know how to do these practices, what<br \/>\nif we thought of it as a giveaway of what do my musical practices contribute to<br \/>\nthe possibility of livable common worlds. And I think we are learning that our<br \/>\nmodern categories and certainties, especially institutionally\u2014and I&#8217;m talking<br \/>\nhere about the givenness of a liberal democracy\u2014are no longer givens. Bruno<br \/>\nLatour is very instructive on this &#8211; the modern world that the West constructed<br \/>\nand the notion that this was the End of History, has now turned out to be quite<br \/>\nmistaken. It\u2019s as if the Global North thought that if everybody just becomes<br \/>\nlike a Western liberal democracy that will be it. And now we\u2019ve realized that now<br \/>\nthe really hard thinking comes, where we can&#8217;t just assume what it means to<br \/>\nlive in a world together, but rather the world has to be built and constructed<br \/>\ntogether, not something that&#8217;s going to be automatically given. I&#8217;m recently drawn<br \/>\nto animist thinking, with the aliveness and vibrancy of life and matter, but also<br \/>\nthat the idea that the world is never simply given but requires ongoing acts<br \/>\nthat construct the world whether we realize that or not. And that each, each<br \/>\nday, any ongoing continuity of the world, is an accomplishment, not something<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s just given. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: I believe that what you&#8217;re both<br \/>\ntalking about can be presented to even young children. I think these are ways<br \/>\nof knowing the world that children embrace and then we too often disregard;<br \/>\nanimist thinking is a place where they absolutely live. I don&#8217;t think that<br \/>\nyoung children have any issues with grappling with questions like what our practices<br \/>\ndo to contribute to a world made common. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin: I am thinking of one little<br \/>\npedagogical strategy I&#8217;ve been doing it, both in my Kod\u00e1ly level teaching and<br \/>\nwith my undergraduates here; I ask students to consider what we think a song is<br \/>\nand how that lives and contributes to creating a world. And if we think about<br \/>\nany song that we come across as a gift, we can&#8217;t just hoard that. How are we<br \/>\ngiving back and helping to sustain livable worlds from where any of these songs<br \/>\ncome from? Last semester when I was teaching general music pedagogy the<br \/>\nstudents were really drawn to the idea of giving back to a community where our<br \/>\nsong comes from. If I&#8217;m just doing a song to simply advance Western literacy,<br \/>\nI\u2019m really doing a disservice to the world. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Dan: And what gifts they might receive from<br \/>\nthe communities wherein they find themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Cathy: There are multiple ways of thinking<br \/>\nabout what it means to give back. I think another way we can give back is by<br \/>\nhonoring silence after song. Music teachers are fond of singing a song or<br \/>\nrehearsing music and then immediately speaking when it ends. Even with those<br \/>\nseemingly simple songs, if we present them as an aesthetic spiritual moment,<br \/>\nwhich we&#8217;re not taught to do in teacher preparation programs, we are giving<br \/>\nback. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-CA>Austin and Dan, I want to thank both of you<br \/>\nfor your time and your essays. I am thankful to the two of you for beginning<br \/>\nwhat will hopefully be a series of conversations that serve to bring<br \/>\nphilosophical dialogue to our community. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/BL><br \/>\n<BL><br \/>\n<H2>Biographies<\/H2><br \/>\n<UL><br \/>\nDr. Austin Showen, Assistant Professor, is Director of Music Education at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia where he teaches general music pedagogy, elementary education, music theory and aural skills, and directs the Shepherd Youth Chorus. He is a West Virginia native and a proud alumnus of Shepherd University where he earned his Bachelor of Music Education. He also holds a Master of Music Education with Kod\u00e1ly certification from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and a Doctor of Philosophy in music education from Arizona State University. As a music educator, Dr. Showen is passionate about building collaborative artistic communities that promote critical and creative inquiry. He has taught pre-kindergarten through graduate-level students in public school, university, healthcare, and church settings in West Virginia and Arizona. He also teaches summer Kod\u00e1ly certification courses at Arizona State University and the University of Montevallo Kod\u00e1ly Institute in Alabama. As a scholar, Dr. Showen focuses on the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, and curriculum studies. He explores how our ideas about the nature of music, learning, and aesthetic experience afford and constrain possibilities for artistic-pedagogic engagement both in and outside of schools. He is also interested in promoting creative approaches to music education that incorporate popular music, composition, and contemporary forms of musicianship. Dr. Showen has presented his research at state, national, and international conferences and has published in the journal Leisure Sciences.<br \/>\n<\/UL><br \/>\n<UL><\/p>\n<p>Daniel J. Shevock is a music education philosopher from the Central Pennsylvania mountains. Dan has taught music students from Kindergarten to University levels. He currently teaches Middle and Elementary school general music and choir in State College, Pennsylvania. The author of Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Dan\u2019s scholarship blends ecology, creativity, and critique. His degrees are from Penn State (Ph.D.), Towson (M.S.) and Clarion University of Pennsylvania (B.S.Ed.). Dan upkeeps a website and blog at eco-literate.com can be reached at dshevock@hotmail.com.<br \/>\n<\/UL><br \/>\n<\/BL><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Newsletters published from ISPME since 2021 Newsletter February 2022 Dialogue between Dan Shevock and Austin Showen Welcome to what we hope will be the first of many discussions where we place two voices together in order to frame issues to which music educators are drawn. Within each newsletter we will be asking music education philosophers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7398","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7398"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7415,"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7398\/revisions\/7415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispme.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}