Music education thrives on philosophical inquiry, the systematic and critical examination of beliefs and assumptions. Yet philosophy, often considered abstract and irrelevant, is often absent from the daily life of music instructors. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, editors Wayne D. Bowman and Ana Lucía Frega have drawn together a variety of philosophical perspectives from the profession's most exciting scholars. Rather than relegating philosophical inquiry to moot questions and abstract situations, the contributors to this volume address everyday concerns faced by music educators everywhere, demonstrating that philosophy offers a way of navigating the daily professional life of music education and proving that critical inquiry improves, enriches, and transforms instructional practice for the better. Questioning every musical practice, instructional aim, assumption, and conviction in music education, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education presents new and provocative approaches to the practice of teaching music. Bowman and Frega go deeper than mere advocacy or a single point of view, but rather conceive of philosophy as a dynamic process of debate and reflection that must constantly evolve to meet the shifting landscapes of music education. In place of the definitive answers often associated with philosophical work, Bowman and Frega offer a fascinating cross-section of often-contradictory approaches and viewpoints. By bringing together essays by both established and up-and-coming scholars from six continents, Bowman and Frega go beyond the Western monopoly of philosophical practice and acknowledge the diversity of cultures, instructors, and students who take part in music education. This range of perspectives invites broader participation in music instruction, and presents alternative answers to many of the fields most pressing questions and issues. By acknowledging the inherent plurality of music educational practices, the Handbook opens up the field in new and important ways. Emphasizing clarify, fairness, rigor, and utility above all, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education challenges music educators around the world to make their own decisions and ultimately contribute to the conversation themselves.
"Education prepares us for an unknown, uncertain future. Conformity, convention, and a lack of creative thinking and action will not serve us fully to face this future. We cannot know, and can only guess, what the future will bring, and we educate truly when we educate for inspiration --for insight and creativity --in the face of the unknown. We aim not to define our students, not to pigeonhole them according to our own inevitably partial and too-narrow view of the world they will inhabit and make. We aim to educate them while leaving them free to rebel, not for no reason, but for a reason, for a cause." --Stephen Sagarin (from the introduction)In this book, Stephen Sagarin clears away a few cobwebs to reveal the art, the living heart, and profound hope contained in the educational impulse known as Waldorf education. With brisk and insightful essays --written by a man clearly working in the midst of his subject matter --he moves through seven core themes of youth education --growth, method, curriculum, terms, principles, governance, and administration --and ends with a hopeful look at the future. Employing pithy observations, bold myth-busting insights into key terms (what they mean and do not mean, including "math gnomes"), child development, and much more, How the Future Can Save Us is an engaging and exciting read for both new and experienced teachers, parents and caregivers, and any student of education. It offers a fresh, hopeful, unconventional, and reinvigorating take on Waldorf education --where it comes from, what it means today, and how it still holds promise for the future.
The papers in this volume continue our focus on emotions of people in Southeast Europe. Grief and sadness are, of course, universal, but they take on different forms of expression. Strong emotional values are often attached to specific foods (e.g. the kurban), usually food is of great importance for labour migrants and in times of crisis. Likewise, dress can be of great emotional significance and value. Wars as well as communist collectivization often lead to emotional consequences such as trauma. Smells and tastes can become expressions of actual or remembered emotions, a fact that can also concern the researchers themselves. Klaus Roth is professor em. at the Institute for European Ethnology of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Milena Benovska is professor em. of the Dept. of Ethnology and Balkan Studies of the South-West University of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. Ana Luleva is Assoc. Prof. at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia.
The papers in this volume continue our focus on emotions of people in Southeast Europe. Grief and sadness are, of course, universal, but they take on different forms of expression. Strong emotional values are often attached to specific foods (e.g. the kurban), usually food is of great importance for labour migrants and in times of crisis. Likewise, dress can be of great emotional significance and value. Wars as well as communist collectivization often lead to emotional consequences such as trauma. Smells and tastes can become expressions of actual or remembered emotions, a fact that can also concern the researchers themselves.
'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.
In Thinking and Destiny, something new, although older than time, is now made known to the world--about Consciousness. The information is largely about the makeup of the human, where man comes from, what becomes of him; it explains what thinking is; it tells how a thought is created, and how thoughts are exteriorized into acts, objects and events, and how they make his destiny. Destiny is thus shown to be self-determined by thinking; and the process of re-existence and the after-death states are told in detail. A single reading of any one chapter of Thinking and Destiny brings rich rewards in new understanding of life`s puzzling mysteries. To read the entire book is to come nearer to knowledge of one`s destiny and how to shape it than is possible through study of anything previously written in the English language. Both the casually curious glancer at books and the most avid seeker for knowledge will be intrigued by the index, which lists more than 400 subjects in Thinking and Destiny, and by the fifteen chapter headings in the Table of Contents, which identify the 156 sections. The Foreword contains the only pages in which Mr. Percival uses the first personal pronoun. Here he relates some of the amazing experiences through which he was able to grasp the knowledge he transmits, and to acquire the ability to do so.
Commentators have long argued about whether to read Paul's personification of Sin in Romans literally or figuratively. Matthew Croasmun suggests both that the cosmic power Sin is nothing more than an emergent feature of a vast network of human transgression and that this power is nevertheless a real person.