This pilot research study explored ethnocultural backgrounds of choristers and their socio-musical experiences participating in Common Thread Community Chorus of Toronto, a community choir that actively pursues cultural inclusion through policies of musical and financial accessibility, as well as choosing repertoire of diverse cultures. A survey of choristers investigated how Common Thread members’ ethnocultural backgrounds informed their perceptions of their musical and social experiences and of the choir’s cultural diversity, working from the assumption that all people have ethnocultural backgrounds. Research findings reveal complex and diverse cultures when singers reflect on their own experiences, but choristers tended to reduce cultural diversity to race and language when thinking about the choir as a whole, suggesting that perceptions may be operating from a white normative centre. The results of this pilot research raise significant questions about multicultural education and cultural inclusion efforts within community choral practices in ethnically diverse urban environments.
This article investigates how community music scholarship has taken up inclusion. Using a modified scoping review methodology, the authors analysed 47 articles published in the International Journal of Community Music from 2008 to 2018, examining how scholars have defined and operationalized the terms 'inclusion' and 'inclusivity', which were used interchangeably in the literature. The authors found that inclusion was often normatively invoked with no definition or approaches provided. In those articles that provided more detail about inclusion, many focused on musical access, such as removing auditions and not requiring previous music skill or knowledge, and processes of musical inclusion, such as creating a friendly and non-judgmental atmosphere, providing multiple ways of engaging with music-making and cultivating musical leadership among participants. Less frequent in the literature were ideas and approaches focusing on social inclusion through music, including frameworks that aimed to address and change systems that create marginalization; approaches that addressed social barriers to participation, such as transportation and childcare; and approaches that decentralized leadership to create collective responsibility and participation. The authors conclude by examining approaches from other scholarly disciplines, arguing that community music scholarship may benefit for more sustained and deliberate use of the term inclusivity, which points to the ongoing practice and effort towards inclusion. Running head: FROM INCLUSION TO INCLUSIVITY 2 Keywords inclusion inclusivity community music literature review social inclusion inclusive education Many scholars assert that inclusion is a cornerstone of community music practice (Higgins and Willingham 2017), usually predicated on the widely circulating idea that everyone has a right to make music (Veblen and Olsson 2002), which we, the authors, also believe. However, despite a noticeable groundswell in using the terms 'inclusion' and 'inclusivity' in relation to community music over the last five years, there has been very little analysis of what these terms mean, nor how they areor should beoperationalized in community music settings. This article represents our attempt to address the gap in the literature by first focusing on how community music scholars have been defining and using inclusion in research. The two of us began this research project when we realized that each of us had concerns about normative uses of inclusion in the Community Music scholarship that we were reading. Deanna had previously raised concerns about the normative uses of the term 'community' (Yerichuk 2014), in which the community is often already assumed and seen as always and only positive without much critical reflection of the social relations that constitute the social space, or the role of the facilitator in setting terms for Running head: FROM INCLUSION TO INCLUSIVITY 3 participation in that community. Justis, through his course work, began to notice that the term 'inclusion' seemed to b...
This study provides a snapshot of tenure at Canadian post-secondary music institutions, with a particular focus on gender and race/ethnicity. The data show tenure has been granted at high rates over a five-year period, and that women are no more or less likely to achieve tenure than men. However, more men than women hold both tenured and tenure-track positions, at a ratio of 2:1. The sample size of non-white faculty was not large enough to conduct statistical analyses about tenure rates in relation to race/ethnicity, although the extremely low rates of non-white tenure-track faculty suggest that diversity remains a concern in post-secondary music programs.Cette étude donne un aperçu de l’obtention de la permanence dans les institutions canadiennes universitaires d’enseignement de la musique, en se concentrant en particulier sur les facteurs de genre et de race/ethnicité. Les données montrent que la permanence a été octroyée à un taux élevé sur une période de cinq ans, et que les femmes n’ont pas plus ou moins de chances de l’obtenir que les hommes. Cependant, il a été observé que plus d’hommes que de femmes occupent les postes réunis avec permanence et menant à la permanence, et ce, dans une proportion de 2 à 1. L’échantillon des professeurs non-blanc n’était pas suffisamment important pour effectuer des analyses statistiques sur les taux de permanence en rapport avec la race et l’ethnicité, bien que les taux très bas de non-blancs à des postes menant à la permanence suggèrent que la diversité demeure une préoccupation dans les programmes postsecondaires d’enseignement de la musique
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