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GENDER RESEARCH IN MUSIC EDUCATION
Prepared for MERC by Patricia O'Toole
The purpose of this proposal is to petition the Society for Research in Music Education (SRME) to approve a Special Research Interest Group (SRIG) in Gender Research in Music Education (GRIME). This SRIG would provide a forum to encourage research focused on gender and to share research-based information among music educators about gender issues.
The mission of the GRIME SRIG is to provide leadership, advocacy, professional contacts, and a strong research agenda for gender researchers in music education.
A Summary of Gender Research in Music Education Gender issues have been on the agenda of music education researchers since the 1960s, reflecting a field of inquiry that has developed considerably over the last 40 years. Initially, researchers looked at sex differences in musical abilities such as singing, motor, rhythm and listening skills. Researchers expanded this investigation to include sex-stereotyping of instrument and music career choices, finding critical disparity between what boys and girls considered appropriate and desirable. From these studies, the profession branched out into numerous areas of inquiry to investigate further sex-based preferences and skill development, and to develop materials that were responsive to gender issues arising from the research.
To understand how sex-stereotyping might be a learned phenomena, researchers studied the representation of males and females in musical materials and text books at all levels. Several areas proved problematic such as the tendency for elementary text books to present women as singers, flutists, and pianists (roles stereotypically perceived as feminine) more often than as composers, percussionists, or brass players (roles stereotypically perceived as masculine). Other researchers criticized college level textbooks for their preoccupations with males to the exclusion of women s contributions. Teachers paralleled this criticism with scrutiny of lyrics to standard classroom music repertoire as being sexist and encouraging narrow, stereotypical images of both girls and boys.
To remedy these negative stereotypes, researchers developed materials for the inclusion of and a concentration on women in music. In addition, numerous articles in research and teacher education journals emphasized topics such as women composers; conductors; performers in the classical, jazz, and popular genres; and music academics. These articles include introducing the profession to women left out of history books, the working conditions of women in music, and issues concerning how, historically, women have been excluded from influential and professional levels of music making.
Another site for critique has been classroom expectations and interactions both between teachers and students, and between peers in general music and performance ensembles. Research suggests that although girls have better attitudes toward music, boys are more frequently rewarded for their accomplishments. Other research queries have found choral directors preoccupied with low male enrollment and the subsequent perceived repertoire constraints, while band directors tend to maintain a mostly male constituency in the position of band director.
With the establishment and success of Womens Studies programs at universities came the addition of gender studies to most academic disciplines. This wide-spread interest created various forms of theorizing based on women's experiences in the world historically, socially, philosophically, scientifically and anthropologically. Further, several strands of feminist theorizing have developed including liberal, social, radical, critical, and post-modern forms of feminism. Each of these political positions have in common a concern for how gender is constructed and the material effects these constructions have on the lives of women, but they differ as they analyze causes and prescribe strategies for liberation. The strength of supporting numerous critiques is that it escapes how narrowly patriarchal constructions of social reality portrays women and men, and seeks to better represent how diversely women and men experience the world. In this sense feminism has resisted becoming a totalizing discourse prescribing only one correct answer, as in the case of patriarchy.
Especially since the 1990s, feminist theory has become part of gender research in music education and has been used in three areas of inquiry: gender studies, feminist pedagogy, and feminist critique. Gender studies have focused on decoding subtle interactions and hidden curricula in order to construct and understand how music participants have learned roles that are clearly delineated by gender that then create unequal educational and musical opportunities. For example, researchers have studied gendered interactions such as: ensembles that perform music primarily by male composers and about male experiences; general music classes where girls appear to be more attracted to music that is melodious, acoustic and performed by female singers while boys tend to be attracted to music that is rhythmic, electronic, and performed by males; or the music profession that sorts teachers according to gender so that women are primarily classroom music teachers and men are primarily secondary instrumental instructors. Second, feminist pedagogy exists in as many forms as feminist theory, and therefore also finds strength in diversity and contradictions.
Issues taken up in the various forms of feminist pedagogy include:
The third category, feminist criticism, is based on the notion that men and women have different experiences in the world. Women operate in different spaces, occupations and cultures from men. Furthermore, the institutions and labour market in which women participate are not the same as those in which men participate; there are few positions of power in the female world. Given that men, primarily, have had the privilege to create policy, theories and analysis, it is no surprise that a woman, operating from a different set of experiences in an otherwise shared world, might come up with a different analysis. Generated by women operating from different parts of the profession than men, feminist critiques of the philosophy of music education have provided the profession with alternative viewpoints.
In summary, gender research is a developing area of interest in music education. This subject has been the topic of several journals and conferences: The Music Educators Journal (1979) had a special focus on women in American music; the American Musicological Society meetings (1988) included a special focus on feminist scholarship and its implications for musicology and teaching while the British Journal of Music Education (1988) was the first research journal to focus on the topic of gender and music education; The Music Educators Journal (1992) dedicated another entire issue to women in music; and The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning (1994) dedicated a double issue to sex equity in music education, while the Philosophy of Music Education Review (1994) had a special issue on feminist perspectives in music education.
Unfortunately, the preceding lineage used to describe gender research in music education is somewhat imposed; actual studies have been isolated and fairly unconnected. This may be due, in part, to a historical minimization of research questions that included sex based differences. The included Bibliography and Suggested Research Agenda indicates that many music educators have an interest in and recognize a need for gender research. This body of research would benefit tremendously from our professional organization supporting and Special Research Interest Group, such as GRIME, in order to promote leadership, advocacy, professional contacts, and a strong agenda for gender research. For reasons discussed below in the methodology section, the conditions are right for the MERC to approve this proposal.
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Since 1991, GRIME has been an organization that has enabled those interested in gender research in music education to network and find supportive colleagues. GRIME has held organizational meetings at three national MENC conferences including 1992, 1994, & 1996. A growing and international organization, GRIME now has 125 members in USA, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Japan, and UK. Bi-annual GRIME newsletters have been published since 1991 (12 in total). Roberta Lamb was responsible for the newsletters from 1991 through vol. 7 no.1, June 1998. Patti O'Toole published vol. 8, and Elizabeth Gould has been the editor since December 2000, vol. 9 no. 1. In addition, a GRIME listserv for posting conference notices, job listings, and research information about gender issues began 1995. Over the past seven years, GRIME has proven to be an invaluable resource for music education gender researchers.
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Until the 1990s the majority of gender research in music education was based on scientific inquiry. From this paradigm facts and statistics about sex-stereotyping were collected and reported. With the introduction of feminist theory in the 1990s, research questions expanded from sex-based differences to the construction of gender roles and identity, in part to explain sex-based differences. Gender refers to culturally defined, or constructed notions of maleness and femaleness as opposed to biologically defined sex. Because social interactions continually produce gender (often in multiple and contradictory ways), the usefulness of the scientific method for gender-based research questions seems questionable.
To apply only scientific method would mean making the following assumptions about the social world: that it is knowable in the same way as the natural world; that there is a clear separation between research subject and research object; and that order exists in the social world in a cause and effect form (Nielson 1990, p4-5). These assumptions are associated with an approach that emphasizes rationality, impersonal interactions, and predications and control over events studied. It does not allow us to explain or suggest solutions for social problems, the realm in which gender production exists.
Gender research encourages unique methodological issues because it requires models that focus on understanding social interactions. There are three traditions from which borrowing would be productive: hermeneutics, critical theory, and standpoint theory. The interpretive or hermeneutic tradition is a theory or method of interpreting meaningful human interaction. Specifically, (interpretive researchers) are concerned with the importance of meaning in social interaction and argue that limiting research to observable human action misses the most important part of the story. To explain and understand any human social behavior...we need to know the meaning attached to it by the participants themselves (Nielson 1990, p. 7).
Interpretive research stresses participant observation which negates the impersonality of naturalistic research. However, it does not escape the subject-object binary because it assumes that an objective position from which to interpret data exists. As a research model it provides a legitimate alternative to those who want to stay within the scientific tradition, but incorporate subjectivity into their research.
Critical theorists have argued against the exclusive use of the scientific model for social inquiry. Criticism in this tradition means more than a negative judgment; it refers to the more positive act of detecting and unmasking, or exposing, existing forms of beliefs that restrict or limit human freedom...the positivists' goal is to predict and control, the hermeneutics' is to understand, and the critical theorists' approach is to emancipate--that is, to uncover aspects of society, especially ideologies, that maintain the status quo by restricting or limiting different groups' access to the means of gaining knowledge (Nielson 1990, p. 9).
Because critical theory emphasizes ideology as organizing factors for the world, it rejects the idea that "objective" knowledge can ever exist. Proponents argue that there is never a neutral or disinterested position because everyone and every group is located socially and historically. Furthermore, this context inevitably influences the interpretation of interactions and the production of knowledge. To critical theorist, all knowledge is socially constructed. Research based on critical theory can produce multiple and contradictory versions of the world, which is sometimes dismissed as relativism. Especially in light of the power relations surrounding gender constructions, struggling with multiple interpretations of the world may create a way of escaping dominant (gender oppressive) ideologies in music education research.
Briefly described, standpoint epistemology begins with the notion that less powerful members of society have the potential for a fuller view of social reality because of their disempowered status (Nielson 1990, p.10). For example, a female band director, because she is a minority, may know how the band profession works on a quotidian basis as well as how it treats or discourages women, issues men will not know about in the same way because such issues do not affect their career development or mobility. However, this does not mean that all women band directors will share this awareness. Consequently, in terms of gender research in music education, women have the potential to know about various forms of patriarchal constructions of identity which limit their participation in music, an experience denied to men. Further, men concerned with and actively working on this same issue will have the potential for more understanding than men with no awareness whatsoever. According to Nielson (1990) the point of standpoint epistemology "--which has the main premise that one's everyday life has epistemological consequences and implications--the disadvantaged have the potential to be more knowledgeable, in a way, than the dominant group." If gender research requires the participation of the researcher and the inclusion of and reflection on one's values, then standpoint epistemology suggests that the disenfranchised, such as female and queer musicians, have unique contributions to make both as researchers and research participants and that their experiences will influence research designs.
In summary, researching gender issues presents unique methodological issues because gender is produced from social interactions that, in our case, affects music teaching-learning processes. It requires researchers to study interactions and therefore, negotiate simultaneously with contextual, historical and culturally bound truths, a paradigm shift that makes anomalies disregarded by ratio-scientific research a central concern. While other areas of music education research may claim similar methodological concerns, gender research, because it is grounded in a concept that is socially and historically produced and reproduced, has the potential to become an innovator of these unique research methods.
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The production and construction of gender in music education is a critically under-researched area. The following list identifies several key areas which would provide rich and professionally significant research.
Works Cited
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