No abstract

This article presents excerpts from a case study describing Angelica Dawson, a New York State music educator. Angelica makes improvisation a central part of her curricula in ways that transcend traditional offerings prevalent in American public schools. Qualitative research methods were used to document Angelica's work over the course of an academic year at a rural public school in New York State. Data collection utilized ethnographic techniques including interviews, observations and informal conversations. Data analysis employed interpretive coding guided by a constant comparative approach. Analysis revealed challenges posed by teaching improvisation in the school music context, including: conflicts with tradition; conflicts with the expectations of colleagues, parents, students, and administrators, and standing apart from the prevailing practices of colleagues. Angelica's story suggests that teachers who break from traditional pedagogical practices face profound challenges and feelings of isolation.

This article presents detailed descriptions of a series of distance collaborations between two institutions of music education; the State University of New York, Oneonta, in the United States, and the Musrara Naggar School of Art in Jerusalem, Israel. The collaborations between Oneonta and Musrara encompass multiple modes of collaborative interaction, including asynchronous, interstitial and synchronized collaboration. As such the collaborations between the two institutions provide a rich case for understanding practical considerations for and implications of technologically mediated and distributed distance collaborations in music. The authors analyse the collaborations between the two institutions to demonstrate how the increasingly deterritorialized, multilocated nature of technologically mediated distance collaborations generates and encompasses multiple levels of poietic space. Those poietic spaces include micro poietic spaces representative of the individual participants, larger poetic spaces representative of co-located collaborators and contributors, and still larger macro poietic spaces that do not exist in anyone single locale but, instead, encompass the entire poietic sphere of such collaborations. To further understand the dynamics of technologically mediated distance collaboration, the authors introduce an emerging model for understanding such collaborations. That model draws on the philosophical concept of poiesis and on distributed cognition theory, framework drawn from the field of human–computer interaction (HCI).

This chapter addresses two overarching questions: “Where is technology within music education?” and “Who is affected and how?” In considering those questions, I attempt to situate technology within and without music education, that is to say, internal to and external to the paradigmatic constraints of institutionalized learning. In the process, I argue for the development of authentically poietic spaces, or communities of response, within music education contexts. Further, I recommend situating technology within those spaces in such ways as to empower otherwise vulnerable young musicians to explore their own interests, idiosyncratic ways of learning, and the deterritorialized, subjective-social worlds they inhabit. The first section of the chapter addresses the particularized nature of technology within music education contexts. The second section includes examples of technology without music education. The final section lists conclusions that attempt to situate technology in and across those two broad domains.

No abstract