“We value new things when they connect to us,” say MENC member Deborah V. Blair and her coauthor, Shinko Kondo, a doctoral student in music education. Blair is an assistant professor of music education in the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Their article “Bridging Musical Understanding through Multicultural Music” from the May 2008 issue of Music Educators Journal  is also available online as this month’s featured article. View the PDF here.

The Blair and Kondo article suggests that we need to seek understanding of other musical cultures, but that we also need to understand that we come from a certain musical culture ourselves. Our perspective, too, is valid, and it’s part of the learning process to recognize that the environment we live in shapes our outlook when we are learning about other musics and peoples.

Idea for your classroom:  Ask your music students to find a type of music that's new to them and come back to the next class (or several days later, if you have music every day) with a recording or a description of the piece and what they found interesting about it.  (Some students may get clever and compose something to perform. A student-composed work is a new piece and a creative answer to the question.)

--Ella Wilcox, May 28, 2008, © MENC: The National Association for Music Education (www.menc.org)