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- Genre: Creative nonfiction
- Genre: Music--Instruction and study--Social aspects.
- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
In this study, I uncover the coded meanings of "urban" within the music education profession through an exploration and analysis of the discourse present in two prominent music education journals, Music Educators Journal (MEJ) and The Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME). Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), I investigate how the term "urban" is used in statements within a twenty-year time span (1991-2010), and how the words "inner-city," "at-risk," "race," and "diversity" are used in similar ways throughout the corpus. An in-depth examination of these five terms across twenty years of two major publications of the profession reveals attitudes and biases within the music education structure, uncovering pejorative themes in the urban music education discourse. The phrase "urban music education" is rarely defined or explained in the corpus examined in this study. Rather, the word "urban" is at times a euphemism. Based on a CDA conducted in this study, I suggest that "urban" is code for poor, minority, and unable to succeed. Relying on the philosophical ideas of Michel Foucault, I uncover ways in which the profession labels urban music programs, students, and teachers and how the "urban music education" discourse privileges the White, suburban, middle class ideal of music education. I call for an evaluation of the perceptions of "success" in the field, and advocate for a paradigm shift, or different methods of knowing, in order to provide a more just teaching and learning space for all music education actors.
ContributorsFarmer, Dawn Marie (Author) / Stauffer, Sandra L. (Thesis advisor) / Schmidt, Margaret (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Sullivan, Jill M. (Committee member) / Tobias, Evan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation is both creative and scholarly, engaging in the technique of "narrative scholarship," an increasingly accepted technique within the field of ecocriticism. The project is framed by my experiences with Spanish and Latino actors as well as activists involved with the 15-M movement in and around Madrid. It takes a "material ecocritical" approach, which is to say that it treats minds, spirits and language as necessarily "bodied" entities, and creates an absolute union between beings and the matter that constructs them as well as their habitat. I apply the lens of Jesper Hoffmeyer's Biosemiotics, which claims that life is at its most essential levels a communicative process. In other words, I will explore how "all matter is 'storied' matter," as well as how the "semiosphere," which is an important concept in biosmiotics, signaling a semiotic environment that predicts and defines all biological bodies/life, the human, the plant and the animal as beings who are made of and involved in semiotic activity, can serve as a basis for union amongst all bodies and provide a model of cooperation rooted in "storytelling." My project aims to embody what Wendy Wheeler describes as ecocriticism's, "syntheses between the sciences and the humanities" It is my strong opinion that creative writing has the power to offer the general public insight into the reasons why new research in biosemiotics is so important to the work that activists are doing to raise awareness of how humans can live responsibly on the only planet that is our home. This will help readers of creative writing and cultural studies scholars understand why they ought to embrace science, especially in literary and cultural studies, as a path to better understanding of the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientifically oriented world.
ContributorsDay, Timothy (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Gutkind, Lee (Committee member) / Flys-Junquera, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016