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Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life
Author: Steve Dillon
Date Of Publication: Jun 2007
Isbn13: 9781847182135
Isbn: 1-84718-213-5
Music, Meaning and Transformation: meaningful music making for life, examines the musical experiences that students find meaningful and the ways in which teachers, parents and community music leaders might provide access to meaningful music education. This is particularly relevant today because school music often fails to provide sustainable access to music making for life, health and wellbeing beyond school. This book seeks to reframe the focus of music education within a pragmatist philosophy and provide a framework that is culturally and chronologically inclusive.

The approach involves an intensely personal music teachers’ journey that privilege the voices of students and teachers of a music making community and sets these against rigorous long termed qualitative methodologies.

Music education is shifting focus away from music as an object and process towards the meaning experienced by the student personally, socially and culturally. This is an important and fundamental issue for the development of philosophy for pre-service and practicing music teachers and community music project leaders. The focus now needs to be upon the 98% who could have music as a significant expressive force in their lives as a means of facilitating social inclusion, for mental health and well being and to have access to the sense of belonging that community music making can bring as a lifelong activity. The book aims to provide a comprehensive guide to music education that leads to a music education for all for life. This book emphasises the maker in context examining: the student as maker, the teacher as builder and designer and the school as village.

The relationship between music making, education and health and well being has been and is the subject of many research projects and national and international reviews. Seldom though in these studies has there been any attempt to identify the qualities of successful and sustainable interactions with music making, the qualities of good teaching and good teaching practice. The focus of this book is to provide simple but effective tools for evaluating and testing the meaning evident in a music-making context, identify the modes of engagement and establish the unique expressive music making needs of twenty first century communities.

For further information see http://savetodisc.net

Steve Dillon is a senior lecturer in Music and Sound at Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Creative Industry. Steve’s research focuses upon meaningful engagement with music-making in schools and communities. He is director of the save to DISC (Documenting Innovation in Sound Communities) http://www.savetodisc.net/ research project which examines and documents the qualities and relationships between music, meaning, health and well being.

"I found this book inspiring, and allowed myself to stop at different places of interest in order to critically explore and further enjoy them. In my view, the major innovation of Dillon's book is his departure for developing his vision of music education through children. He is interested in examining children's unique outlook of their musical experiences and the relevance of this experience to their lives, and factors that enable children to develop self-contained dialogue with music through listening, performing, and creating...Dillon's inspiring journey runs in parallel tacks in the field of music education, thereby widening its horizon."

Lia Laor, Levinsky College of Education, Israel, Volume 11, Review 2 - Feb 2010.

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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Interesting reviews

From Navigating Music and Sound Education

“We rarely have the opportunity and time to engage with the practicalities of music teaching through the lens of evidence-based practice. This book provides us with a wonderful exception that is accessible to beginning and established teachers. It contains a wide range of stimulating and thought-provoking material that draws on real-world experiences and events, which are contextualised, informed and structured by theory. This is a powerful combination that we can visit again and again for insight and inspiration. Congratulations to all involved, particularly the editors for shaping such a valuable contribution!”
—Professor Graham F. Welch, University of London; President, International Society of Music Education

“Navigating music and sound education draws together a range of issues increasingly acknowledged to be at the basis of reflective and effective music learning and teaching: social settings, cultural dimensions, gender, indigeneity, varying cognitive approaches, inter-disciplinary connections, technology, types of learning, and creativity. It opens up areas of pedagogy that go beyond classroom methodology to acknowledge student individuality and encourage music learning and teaching grounded in the reality of students’ musical and social lives. It will be invaluable for those training to become educators and for teachers already in the field.”
—Associate Professor Peter Dunbar-Hall, University of Sydney

“This book brings an important contribution to music teacher education as it challenges the readers to rethink their paradigms of music education. It highlights the importance of preparing a reflective teacher, autonomous, creative and conscious of the multifaceted and multicultural locus in which they will work. The book also draws on the importance for music teachers to consider the context in which they work, and establish a dialog between local musical traditions, informal music practices and global trends of music teaching and learning. Most importantly, all chapters are in one way or another derived from research carried out on specific areas, thus stressing the importance of the research informed practice in music education.”
—Professor Liane Hentschke, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; International Society of Music Education Immediate Past President

Many readers will appreciate Steve Dillon and Kathy Hirche’s description of the future of education in their work with dynamic technological contexts.

Navigating Music and Sound Education is a wonderful guide and resource for pre-service music teachers, for teachers in the field, and for teacher educators.

It offers a range of fresh perspectives on the state of music education as it is and as it might be. Kari K Veblen

Navigating Music and Sound Education is an ambitious project which features current research from 20 individuals whose professional identities run the gamut from musician to songwriter to student to educator to music therapist to ethnomusicologist. The book’s scope is perhaps the most exciting aspect of Navigating Music and Sound Education.
Kari K Veblen
University of Western Ontario
British Journal of Music Education
October 2011