Found myself reading ignatia’s blog today which discusses connectivism (which could be thought of as a particular approach to thinking and acting with technology) and what simmilarities it shares with interpretivism and critical social science. While many interesting questions are raised I came across the following which relates to my thinking here on Music technology in Education :

“You can’t build a society with walls. …In the longer term we have to do something more imaginative than blocking this technology. We need to live and teach and learn where the students live and teach and learn. That means that we have to stop blocking to their spaces and go to their spaces. So we explore their world. But, you know, there’s the age-old danger of explorers that when we go to their world, we’re going to want to colonize it. And we’re going to want to make them like us. And we’re going to want to take them from their mountains and put them in rooms and put walls around them and put locks on their doors and say, “This is civilization.”

The link for me came when I put it together with several conversations I have had over the mast few months about informal music making and also uses of technology. I am glad that music educationalists in the UK seem to be recognising more and more that students’ musical spaces and worlds are the places in which learning becomes meaningful.But I have a concern about the end result. When I was an undergraduate I remember sitting in many lectures being given by Rob Provine and Jonathan Stock (not at the same time) to whom I am eternally grateful for helping to open my eyes to the ways in which we can view other cultures. I remember discussions about ethnomusicologists going to other cultures, studying their ‘music’ and getting completely the wrong ‘end of the stick’ (Not Rob & Jonathan I hasten to add). I also remember that visitors to other cultures have in the past (and no doubt in the present)  changed what they went to explore – perhaps ‘transformed’. I think that it is possible to consider some students as occupying one culture (let’s call it ‘informal music making’) and some teachers as occupying another (let’s call it ‘formal music making’). So when I think about trends in UK music education the question I have been leading up to is this: Are we in danger of doing the same thing that past gerenations of ‘colonisers’ have been criticised for? Are the British up to their old tricks again? …or is this what we want to do as ‘teachers’? Do we want to ‘take over’ our students music and make it better?

Where does this end? For me it is perhaps not when we help them to persue their own ‘informal music making’ but when we assess their music according to criteria that we decide are important.

Of course if we deny that it is their music then we can take ownership quite easily and the problem is solved. So here’s another question: who’s music is it anyway?

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