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  • Editorial
  • Estelle R. Jorgensen

The Fall 1994 issue of Philosophy of Music Education Review (vol. 2, no. 2) examined feminism and music education. It seemed appropriate to ask, after the intervening fifteen years, how women now view the work of music education. As a significant group of music teachers and students in studios, schools, conservatories, colleges, and other places where music education is conducted, women's perspectives on the situations in which they do their work are crucial to the future of music education.

All too often, music teachers work in stressful and even inhumane situations that undermine the idealism and hope that led them to music teaching in the first place. External mandates on their work and standardized expectations of their teaching limit their freedom of action in meeting the needs of their students. Discourses of control dominate their thinking notwithstanding that much of their lived and teaching life seems beyond control, leaving them with a sense of inadequacy and disillusion when control seems beyond their grasp. In the academy, university women face the dictates of often unyielding and stringent demands. Should they risk experimenting with new approaches or dare to differ from the established norms of the academy, they are likely to be diminished, disciplined, or dismissed. Given the difficult situations in which teachers must sometimes work, it is no surprise that so many school music teachers depart the profession after a relatively short period, leaving the profession too often bereft of the wisdom and experience of veteran teachers. Worse, the work performed by women is often under-appreciated, if appreciated at all, and they are rendered invisible when they focus on those things that are important to them but may not be regarded as significant by the gatekeepers to the profession. It is small [End Page 95] wonder when they do not find a place in the institutional histories of music education as their work is often conducted on the fringes of what is regarded as most significant by the field. And all too often, the possibilities of liminality for the musical experience (and by extension, music education) are overlooked in efforts to objectify and dehumanize musical study and thereby render it academically respectable.

Rather than settle for simply enumerating and explicating these problems, our writers in this issue posit divergent approaches to the work of music education. Beyond criticizing the discourses of the status quo, they forge what they consider to be other more productive and humane ways of doing and undergoing music education. The threads that connect their propositions are the courage to see things in fresh ways, a concern for bringing the people who are involved in music education into the center of the enterprise, and a hope for creating a better world of music education that is manifestly humane. To follow their lead is to grasp the futility of total control of self and others, the importance of following one's own convictions, the power of imaginative thinking about music education, the importance of those approaches to music education that foster happiness in all who do its work, the rich heritage of women music teachers who passionately followed their own ideas about music education, and the power of musicking spaces where people can interact and negotiate beliefs and practices towards transformed and transforming musical and educational experiences.

To encapsulate the important themes in this issue, occasionally, PMER carries extended essays that cover extensive and important conceptual territory but because of the limitations of space must be broken into parts. Such is the case with an essay by Julia Eklund Koza that leads off this issue. In part 1, Koza lays the conceptual groundwork for an analysis that continues in Part 2 to be published subsequently, with special application to music education. Here, she examines those moments in which the body seems out of control and in which, in her words, "bodies seem to have minds of their own." Her analysis addresses a "void" in the literature concerning matters of power and governance as she explores the limits of power and the incompleteness of control either of self or of others. She critically examines some of the prevalent assumptions in the literature regarding control...

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