Bringing Music to Life . . . RESEARCH CHAIR - Dr. Tiger Robison


How Music Educators Influence People to Enter the Profession and Bring Music to Thousands


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nterpret the current Windsong theme “Bringing music to life” as a reference to the consistent factors that music educators tend to cite as their reasons


for dedicating their lives to our artful profession. Like any other profession, ours is dependent in part on ample numbers of interested people entering it.


Tis in turn has spurned music teacher recruitment as a canonized research topic. Te reason I have centered this article on recruitment is that the very readers of Windsong are the most influential people in a young person’s decision to pursue music education, and they are also responsible for nearly all of the other influential experiences (Robison, Williams, Hoffman, Eros, 2019).


I had the fortune of working with some excellent colleagues on several projects about what makes young people join our profession, and what are the best ways to support them. Te latest available project is in the NAfME journal Update: Applications of Research in Music Education (cited above and available at https://journals.sagepub. com/home/upd ) in which we reviewed over 200 articles on this subject. Te most logical way to organize them was into the following categories: honors ensembles (i.e., “All State”), university- affiliated outreach programs (e.g., “String Project”, “Band Project”, and specialized summer camps), auditioning music education candidates (e.g., asking people auditioning at universities to fill out surveys), qualitative studies, marginalized populations, and string music recruitment. In distilling down all of the research into


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bullet points, we found a few things that may be of interest to fellow Windsong readers currently, three of which are in this article.


First, so many young people choose to audition at universities because they were inspired by their secondary ensemble (i.e., band, choir, orchestra) teacher.


camps. Lastly, young people oſten cite their experiences with honors ensembles, such as “All State” groups, as formative experiences for making the decision to join the profession. What to note here is


is interesting that a music educator,


particularly a secondary ensemble director, is responsible or could be responsible for all of these factors. In this way, a music educator (perhaps one reading this article at the WMEA convention) wields an enormous amount of power and opportunity to “bring the music to life” for thousands of future students.


Second, there is a small but growing number of studies about people from historically marginalized populations entering music education and some of the struggles they face. Tese struggles usually involve people living in urban poverty, which does exist in Wyoming to a degree, but the lessons learned from these


young people’s struggles


and successes are generalizable to rural poverty, which unfortunately exists


Usually young people want to replicate the excellent experience they had in high school for the next generation. Another factor is the opportunity for small teaching experiences that young people are afforded, such as running sectionals, teaching private lessons, or working at


summer


to a great extent in our state. Te lessons are these, and the relevance to my fellow Windsong readers is self-evident: 1) Tere are significant financial barriers to private- lesson instruction for many students, 2) Students need help to navigate the college admission and audition process.


Continued on page 33 Wyoming Windsong


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