Seeking Connections

Abstract

Abstract Seeking Connections: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Music Teaching and Learning emphasizes the relationship of music to closely related fields of study. The book’s central purpose is to illustrate the principle of permeability—that music influences, and is influenced by, other realms of knowing. Music educators who adopt an interdisciplinary perspective create educative experiences that encourage boundary-crossing explorations of music integrated with complementary realms of students’ lives. Interdisciplinarity in this sense is less about how school subjects are organized than it is about cultivating curiosity, imagination, and habits of mind for seeking connections and encouraging relational thinking. The perspective also seeks to foster the creation of meaning, creative and critical thinking, historical empathy, and teachers’ agency through integrating subject matter, pedagogy, and assessment toward these ends. Examples from settings ranging from elementary school through higher education portray curricular projects involving music, visual art, poetry, and history, and provide profiles of teachers and artists who embrace disciplinary and interdisciplinary aims in complementary ways. By highlighting the relationships of music to closely related areas of study, and by emphasizing fluidity and responsiveness in curriculum-making, music education may become better aligned with the lived experience of teachers and students, and with the dynamic presence of music in society at large.