Disrupting the Patriarch: Agentive Music Education, (Hyper) Masculinity, and Me

• In Event: 61.059 - Montage, Collage, Bricolage, Pastiche: Inciting Representations of Arts-Based Educational Research Through Translations, Interpretations, and Transformations

Abstract

My endeavor of this evolving study broadly focuses on my teaching and how my students learn in our musical world. I have also been drawn to a particular vocal work during this study, rehearsing Schubert’s Winterreise––a monodrama about a single character investigating the labyrinth of inward or an interior quest for self-knowledge (Youens, 1991)––and I plan to ascertain salient connections that ensue from my capitulation that “art is an active participant in my life” (manovski, 2014, p. 185). However, I wonder if responsiveness to principles of democracy, equality, or equity––named within contexts of caring and concern––are moot, notwithstanding our fluid priority of socio-cultural justice. Moreover, I question what may positively or negatively enable learner and musical agency in our classrooms in ways that are new, useful, and healthfully transformative to educational stakeholders.

Barone and Eisner (2012) note that an important attribute to arts-based research may be the capacity for enhancing alternative meanings that adhere to social phenomena, thereby undercutting the authority of what Lyotard (1979) calls the master narrative or prevailing metanarrative “that come[s] to be taken for granted as truthful” (Barone & Eisner, 2012, p 124). Sidling––the inner-voice that influences students and teachers––Chohan (2010) jots, “Becoming aware of the conversations that take place within the mind has the potential to assist one in recognizing whether the internal voice is self-limiting or self-encouraging” (p. 10).

Accompanied by Jones, Adams, and Ellis (2013), autoethnographic inquiry has become part of my hybrid way of being and becoming in the world––a way into researching and incorporating insider knowledge about qualitative experience––that requires living consciously, emotionally, and reflexively while empathically challenging objective issues of authority, method, representation, and voice. Developing insights into the complexities of my own expanding experience and scholarship (manovski, 2012, 2013, 2014), I aim to humbly continue embodying the epistemological arts-based researcher role with my colleagues that invites participants to re-examine what they think they have already seen or have come to know from my quest and perspective.

This scholarly construction-in-progress contains shards of my teaching experience, including artwork, stories, photographs, and audio/video recordings from my elementary school music classroom, located within the southeastern Detroit area of Michigan.

Incipient themes may be linked to (hyper) masculinity (Richardson, 2012), fear of men (hooks, 2003), and those social identifiers playing in-between agentive or privileged groups and those people disenfranchised or targeted in school.

While creatively generating new knowledge, critically conserving valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transforming those understandings through writing, teaching, and application––personifying Golde’s (2006) notion of “steward of the discipline” (p. 5)––my immersion within these intersecting happenings within and out of our classroom will optimistically facilitate genuine deliberation. Perhaps within that interplay of multiple voices––as Greene (1995) reminds––we may attend to the “plurality of consciousnesses” (p. 198) in order to “summon up… networks of concern in which we teachers still do our work [to]… create and recreate ourselves” (p. 197).

Author

• Miroslav Pavle Manovski, Independent Scholar