Hello!
Man, I’ve consumed masses of mass media in the last fifty years or so. So, look out for plenty of Gen X pop culture references (I was born in the “Summer of ‘69”… Oh Yeah!”) if you decide to take this journey with me. Here comes one now…
As I make my way around the education community, I sometimes feel like Elmer J Fudd in one of my favourite Looney Tunes (or was it Merrie Melodies?) cartoons from my childhood. In Rabbit Season, Duck Season, Elmer has to decide if it’s Rabbit Season or Duck season. His decision has dire consequences for Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck who try to convince Elmer they know the answer by yelling at him. Bugs says it’s Duck Season, Daffy says it’s Rabbit Season, and so forth and so on until Elmer makes a choice and BANG! Other times, I feel like I’m Bugs or Daffy, yelling at Elmer, as I try to convince pre-service and/or in-service classroom teachers to think differently (or maybe more like me?) about their teaching. I think I developed this metaphor via my go-to foundation for music education, life, and the universe - Elliott and Silverman’s Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd Edition. They present a line drawing on page 9 and ask if the reader sees a rabbit or a duck (which sets me off into the loop described above) or a myriad of other possibilities.
So why are Fuller, Elliott, and Silverman (see what I did there?) talking about rabbits and ducks? Well, music education has its own Rabbit Season, Duck Season. John Dewey explains it like this, he says:
MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. (1938, p. 23)
Classroom music teachers have layers of these “either-ors” to deal with from education generally and music education specifically. Dewey saw the overarching either-or for educators as the belief that education is “development from within”, “based upon natural endowments” vs “formation from without” through a “process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired under external pressure” (1938, p. 23). In his time, at the dawn of the 20th century, he saw this playing out as traditional vs progressive education. A century later this either-or thinking continues via never ending debates like explicit instruction vs minimal guidance, open vs closed classrooms, knowledge/content rich curriculum vs discovery learning, teacher-directed vs student-directed, technology restricted vs technology rich, et cetera, ad nauseam…
Then, there’s the music education layer, impacted by the overarching either-or and adding a host of subject specific either-ors like classical vs pop, artist vs technician, notation vs aural, electric vs acoustic, canon vs current, aesthetic vs praxial, music 2 vs music 1 (a NSW, Australia thing), formal vs informal, et cetera, ad nauseam…
What’s going on here? Given that Dewey outlined this all pretty carefully in 1938, why haven’t we laid all of this to rest so we can get on with the business of educating the children? DnM (my affectionate nickname for David Elliott and Marissa Silverman), lay it out beautifully in two passages that changed my life and are really the raison d'être for this blog. Why is this so DnM?
Why? Because the most fundamental concepts at the center of our field - music, education, teaching, learning, creativity, listening, performing, curriculum, beauty, artistry, assessment, and the like-are conceptually, culturally, emotionally, ethically, practically, and politically complex, ambiguous, and ever-changing. This is why philosophers call these terms "essentially contested concepts”. Contested concepts are unstable, "slippery”; culturally situated, and value-laden ideas that resist conclusive definitions and consensus. (p. 9)
So, according to Dewey and DnM, we’re inclined to think in terms of either-ors and our whole operation as music educators rests on either-ors that are “essentially contested concepts”. This explains the “Elmer Fudd Effect™” and why, as music educators, we can so often feel like we’re being shouted at from either side: “It’s Explicit Instruction Season!”, “No, it’s Project-based Learning Season!”, “No it’s Explicit Instruction Season!”, or “It’s Formal Learning Season!”, “No it’s Informal Learning Season!”, “No, it’s Formal Learning Season!”.
And there it is, a pretty compelling reason to start a blog and share it with you. In the land of music education, is it Rabbit Season or Duck Season? Does it have to be either-or? Are there other seasons? Who gets to decide? How? What does this all mean for me and what am I going to do about it? These kinds of questions have directed my research and reflection about music education (and life) for the last decade. I’m going to recount and continue my journey here, and I invite you to join me, in community, in dialogue.
💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:
5 things I found interesting this week:
* I heard this bass line in Ascension by Maxwell and thought it was brilliant.
* I found this bookmark that I kept of a blog from one of my students about a lesson concept that Pete and I like to call the BoT Session™ (Back on Track).
* The Pez Outlaw - The guy that forced companies to change their redemption policies by being too good at getting free stuff. What a hero, and is fully in line with the GBL stick it to the man vibe. We’ll do a post in the future about our relationship with Pez.
* I’m using IEMs all the time and found this helpful to improve my own IEM mix - Making IEM Mixes Better: What is Occlusion?
* I’ve told this story to many music classes throughout my career, but really enjoyed this presentation of it - Behind Rock’s Most Iconic Guitar Riff: Deep Purple
💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:
Ways to work together?
* Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.
* Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.
* Want to get to know me? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter
I read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.
Dr Brad Fuller
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