Abstract: We investigate the uses of social medias by disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities. Viewing social medias as potential assistive technologies, we discuss SignSnap, Bandhub, and Facebook and discuss how these platforms are used by disabled/musicians/musicians with disabilities to connect with others and generate content. We also critically examine how generated content is read/heard and may be (mis)represented and (mis)appropriated by nondisabled audiences through the critical case of the video of Julia Maritza Ceja. This case, analyzed through the application of theories of disability develop in disability studies literature, examines the ease by which content generated by disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities can become problematic through what we can “inspiration pornification.” We conclude by noting both the positive and problematic potentials of social median in the music learning and music making of disabled musicians/musicians with disabilities. 

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Introduction:In this chapter I discuss means of fostering inclusive music making experiences as demonstrated in the practices of a music therapy rock band, the Smooth Criminals. The band uses many adaptive strategies to mitigate physical barriers to participation that may be useful in other music learning spaces. The band’s practices provide means of identifying and negotiating social barriers deeply rooted within popular and informal learning practices. 

​​Abstract: This case study explores the means and meanings of participation in a music therapy rock band for young adult members. The band, the Smooth Criminals, was comprised of five young adult members diagnosed with developmental disabilities and four adult assistants, including three music therapists/interns and myself as a volunteer. Data collection included: video recordings of weekly rehearsals and three concert; field notes; interviews with young adult members, their family members, and the other adult assistants; and a researcher journal. Through data analysis using organizational and axial coding, three major themes emerged: (1) young adult members use the band as a space to play with and construct personal identity, (2) participation in the band afford the young adult members and their family members a space for community and mutual care, and (3) adult assistants as acting as embellishers and providing a safety net. Findings suggest the experiences hold mostly social and identity-based meanings for young adults and that actions of the young adults are facilitated by self-adaptations and help from adult assistants. The discussion explores possible implications of this study for music education and music education research practices.

​Keywords: Developmental disabilities, music therapy, popular music, adaptive practices, inclusion

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine the what, how, and extent to which disabled persons have been represented photographically in the popular music education publication known as the Music Educators Journal (MEJ). I used captions/text and visual means to identify photographs of disabled persons in 643 issues of the MEJ from 1914 until 2015. Data for this content analysis included every photograph of disabled persons (N = 186) located. Photographs were analyzed for disability labels, setting, integration, activities depicted, percieved race, location in the journal, and decade. The majority of photographs of disabled persons were found in the 1980s, possibly in response to the 1975 legislation PL 94-142 (now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). Mental impairment was the most frequently represented disability in the photographs (30.1%), followed by visual impairment (9.7%), hearing impairment (7.0%), with 30/1% of photographs depicting persons with unspecified disability labels. Additionally, I found an overabundance of general music classroom settings for photographs (37.1%) as compared to all other music education classroom settings (16.1%). Overall, the limited percentage of disabled persons in the MEJ suggests a marginal status and/or concern for disabled persons within the popular consciousness of music education of the United States.  

Introduction: How are the creative processes of musicians and dancers related? How can musicians and dancers reimagine their common roles? What would equality look like in a room of musicians and dancers? How would ideas be exchanged in such an environment? What would creative collaboration look like? In what ways can a collaborative group of musicians and dancers improve communication amongst one another?

​    In this essay, we explore how creative experiences in groups might impact communication among members through group creativity experiences for the Urban Art Ensemble at Arizona State University in the Spring of 2015. Preliminary research began on the UAE’s midterm day when members facilitated their own activities aimed at increasing communication through examining domain specific knowledge related to roles and structure/form. For half of the class, we observed the dancers lead activities that addressed roles and communication. For the second half of class we then saw musicians lead the group in activities focused on form and structure of a music genre. From this point, we developed a two- day project that we hoped would give members a chance to creatively engage in experiences with one another that might help them develop their abilities related to group creative communication. In this essay, we will discuss the impetus and structure of our project, examine what happened through the words of members, and articulate important take-aways that might empower our own work facilitating group creative work and which could be useful for others in similar settings. First, thought, we will set the stage by discussing the unique context of this study, the Urban Arts Ensemble. 

This is an interactive text that conveys summary ideas from socio-cultural readings from a graduate level course. This was created by Myself, Michael Gutierrez, Kangwon Kim, and Roger Wagner.

This manuscript is a final project paper from a graduate level course: Digital and Participatory Culture

The ability to interact meaningfully with tools and work collaboratively with others are two skills that are central to modern cultural engagement, according to Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, and Robison (2009). These skills, distributed cognition and collective intelligence, are also central to modern musical engagements that students may encounter in their lives. Tobias’ (2013) “typical ways people engage with music in participatory culture” (p. 30) all include some element of these two skills as individuals and groups work together to make use of digital, analog, and acoustic instruments, tools, and applications in creating remixes, covers, tutorials, etc. The development of such skills not only opens up pathways to the types of musical interactions indicated above, but also can afford students ways to engage in forms of participatory culture--affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving, and circulations (Jenkins et al., 2009)--in a music classroom, thereby creating new ways to connect and participate in such a setting. It is on these two skills, distributed cognition and collective intelligence, as well as the notion of collaborative problem solving that this music curricular project seeks to help students foster while encouraging them to play with sound in new and interesting ways.

The project described below involves student groups creating an intermedia product (Tobias, In Press) that connects sounds, a motion controller, and movement sequences in a unique way in which all the individual parts fuse together to create a unified product. In the project, students will generate and record sounds to be triggered by a motion sound controller they construct using the web-based computer programing tool Scratch. Students will then test these controllers by composing movement-sequences as a way of assessing the product’s possible effectiveness as an interactive sound installation. This project makes use of the  instructional approach of design-based learner (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008) that operates on the understanding “that children learn deeply when they are asked to design and create an artifact that requires understanding and applications of knowledge” (p. 45). This approach encourages students to not only create a product that exemplifies their understanding and takeaways from certain experiences, but also to dialogue with the product and other members of their design team as they refine their work in a way that is dynamic and organic. In order to help with the refinement process, the project includes elements of pilot-testing and iterative design from the works of Birringer (2005) and Dena (2011).

​The overall intent of this project is to give students chances to foster skills needed so they can more fully participate in modern cultural activities, including musical activities. Music teachers must realize their role in helping students develop these cultural skills and see, as Jenkins et al. note, “[e]veryone involved in preparing young people to go out into the world has contributions to make in helping students acquire the skills they need to become full participants in society” (2009, pp. xiv-xv). In developing these skills in musical settings, student will also develop musical analytical and creative skills in their explorations of multiple musical dimensions as they generate sounds to be used in the project, during their development of a motion controller, and while they explore space and pilot-test their work through movement sequences. A secondary overarching goal of this project is to demonstrate other ways that students and community members can engage with musical sounds and products in more participatory ways that do not necessarily function within the tradition of common participatory performances (Turino, 2008). This is embedded within the culminating sharing event. Finally, I hope that this project can illustrate ways of opening up creative and collaborative spaces for more participatory interactions with music within music classroom settings. Such spaces would RATHGEBER SOUND + CODE + TEST 4 allow for lower-barriers to expression and engagement, a focus on creating and sharing musical works, higher-degrees of social collaboration, and greater student agency and ownership over their contributions (Jenkins et al., 2009) in the ways of musicking

Introduction: Professor Barbara Crowe of the Arizona State University Music Therapy Program is an influential thinker and practitioner in the field of music therapy. This school year, 2014-2015 marks a very important year for music therapy at Arizona State University in the field, in general, as it is Professor Crowe’s final year prior to her retirement. Crowe has not only helped to firmly establish the Music Therapy program at ASU, but also, through her scholarship and leadership, she has forever impacted the trajectory of music therapy as a profession and as an academic field. Her stories and recollections noted below can give us greater insight into not only her own thinking and development as a therapist, but also highlight her practical and philosophical contributions to the field, at large.
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The following three interviews occurred on separate afternoons in September and October and took place in Professor Crowe’s office, with its packed bookshelves, adaptive instruments, and wall full of awards and recognitions for her work. During these two interviews, we discussed her life, important professional relationships, her work, and her own reflections about her impressive legacy. The first interview focused mainly on her early life, schooling, and collegiate teaching experiences. 

This manuscript is a listening curriculum developed in a master's degree curriculum class:

Music is a listening-based artfom. It is through direct aural experiences with sound that humans interact with music at its most basic level. Listening to music is the most personal and focused level of engagement with music that most people have. It is an intimate interaction with sound in which, as Reimer (2003) states, “[l]isteners are called on to make sense of the music, to ‘put it together’ with mind, body, and feelings” (p. 117). Regarding listening’s creative core, Kerchner (1996) explains that listening is not merely a passive activity, but instead that “[l]isteners create and recreate their own musical experiences by perceiving certain musical elements” (p. 28). When listening, people take the sonic elements of a musical work and pair them with their own experiences and history to derive personal meaning. Also, music listening is an essential component to all other kinds of musical activity. Accordingly, listening must have a central place within any music curriculum. Yet, listening does not often receive such focused attention in music classrooms with regard to skill development and/or creative processing.

Music is pervasive in our society and students regularly hear music in stores, on television, and on their own music players. However, one may ask if they are listening. Mills (2009) notes that the persistent sonic environment may “reinforce the habit of not noticing sound” (p. 75) and, therefore, students may not be fully developing their active listening skills to their fullest potential on their own. This is not to say that children come to music class without any sense of critical, creative, or meaningful listening abilities. Indeed, the musical genres and styles they choose to engage with on their own and with their families shape their understanding of listening and develops a different set of skills. In music class, listening instruction should seek to build upon and supplement a student’s personal listening skills.

​The following listening curriculum is rooted upon the philosophical grounding of Reimer’s (2003) conception that listening is an act in which “[e]ach individual listener must bring to that task his of her technical capacities to hear the complexities of the music” (p.117) in order to draw meaning from musical works. However, in order for students to be creative listeners and meaning makers, the “technical capacities” require specific and guided instruction. This is the crux of my project; to plan a sequential, meaningful, and relevant curriculum for the development of music listening skills. Specifically, students should be able to differentiate and discuss the musical elements of pitch/melody, rhythm/meter, dynamics, tempo, articulation, and timbre as they relate to the expressive and structural components of a musical work with a firm understanding of how these elements interact to create a musical whole.

This manuscript is a history master's degree domain project. 

History classes can be an enjoyable journey through time for students. However, history is often presented in a dry and/or non-experiential manner. Music history can be one of the areas of study that the second paradigm often holds true. When I take a look back on the my own music education, most lessons that focused on composers and their historical context were the least enjoyable and most quickly forgotten. I am surely not alone. In a 2007 study, Campbell, Connell, and Beegle found that one area of concern middle schooler noted about their music classes was “boring music” they learned about that did not relate to their musical taste. So, why is it that music history and “classical” music, in general, is regarded as boring areas of study for so many students? The problem could lie in the way in which such lessons are presented. How can music educators expect students to enjoy learning about and retain information on music history when, all too often, it is presented in the form of outdated, lecture style lessons that do not seem relevant to students’ lives, their educational needs, and personal preferences?

For my music history domain, I tired to find a way to present Western Art Music History to my students experientially in an interdisciplinary manner so that they would find enjoyment and relevance in what they learned. I regularly include classical music in my lessons and fifth grade students are expected to experience a survey and display a basic level of understanding about four periods of Western Art Music History; Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th Century/Modern. Yet, I have always struggled with marking these types of lesson highly engaging. Therefore, I developed some methods, tools, and projects that would assist me in teaching this part of my curriculum in a way that would be well received by my students and also leave them with a developing body of knowledge. In doing this, I attempted to change the way I ​taught to help develop my students’ “21st Century Skills” of collaboration, critical thinking, making global connections, self-direction, and use of technology as a learning tool, as described by Ravitz, Hixson, English, and Mergendoller (2012). Two methodologies utilized as guiding concepts to achieve these ends are Project-Based Learning (Solomon, 2003) and flipped learning as advocated by Kahn (2011).