School Music's Precarity Paradox: Inscriptions of Legitimacy and Exclusion Through Evidence-Based Research

• In Event: The New Sciences of Teaching: Theorizing Their Differences and Exclusions

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the paradoxical effects of evidence-based research in contemporary music education discourses. Given concerns that school music continues to occupy a precarious position—particularly in U.S. schools serving minoritized students (Give A Note Foundation, 2017)—school music advocacy literature seeks to secure more funding and increased access by marshaling scientific evidence. Through its semblance of certainty and immediate applicability (Biesta, 2007; Popkewitz, 2020), evidence-based research promises clear pathways to improve music education practice and prove the subject’s efficacy toward broader educational objectives (Bowman, 2009). The study explores how school music advocacy literature assembles heterogeneous types of evidence that make up the effective music teacher as one who identifies student needs and remedies them through better funded and scientifically differentiated school music. The paper highlights an irony in how efforts to secure the subject through evidence-based research reinscribe various forms of precarity.

Theoretical Perspectives
This investigation builds on the work of education scholars that interrogate scientific discourses in contemporary educational research and practice (Biesta, 2007; Popkewitz, 2020; Wescott, 2022). I problematize how evidence-based research in music teacher discourses fashion music teachers’ conceptions of their practice and educational change along evidence-informed and, thus, pre-scripted lines.

Methods and Sources
Foucault’s (1980) writings inform my critical analysis of school music advocacy documents. I focus on this literature because of its emphasis on helping music teachers ascertain their programs’ effectiveness and justify their subject’s presence in schools. I study advocacy websites, statements, brochures, and handouts published in the last decade (2012–2022) by prominent U.S. music education organizations such as the National Association for Music Education. Following Foucault (1972), I examine how references to evidence-based research in this literature regulate music teachers’ conceptions of themselves, target students, and the pedagogical needs that school music promises to address.

Warrants for Argument
My analysis suggests that school music’s appeals to evidence-based research to justify and expand access to the subject (e.g., Bowman, 2005) simultaneously reinscribe the subject area, its teachers, and target student groups as precarious. Types of evidence have undergone constant upgrades, such as correlations of music education outcomes with standardized mathematics test scores, metrics of creativity as a twenty-first-century skill core to STEAM education, and Social Emotional Learning scales. Nonetheless, appeals to evidence-based research continually project racialized subgroups as primary targets of music education interventions—making them up as underperforming, underrepresented, and candidates for trauma-informed care. Furthermore, school music’s delineation of evidence-based research forecloses non-prescriptive approaches to change, including those interrogating the assumptions upon which varied lines of empirical research rest (e.g., historically informed investigations, Indigenous research paradigms).

Significance
This investigation calls attention to how evidence-based research in music teacher discourses may exacerbate school music’s precarity and reinscribe some students as pathologically different while seeking to advance and legitimize the discipline. In so doing, the paper invites avenues of reconsidering school music and educational change that are more vigilant and responsive to these historical dangers of producing precarity in attempting to secure the field.

Author

• Antia Gonzalez Ben, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author