Seeking Connections An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Music Teaching and Learning

Music connects the lives of students, teachers, and school communities in many ways. Music is also integrally related to other art forms, history, culture, and other subjects commonly taught in schools. These relationships deserve critical attention, particularly as educators seek to reorient their curricula and pedagogy toward the pressing aims of social justice.

Seeking Connections encourages interdisciplinarity as a capacity to be exercised-an orientation or habit of mind that teachers and students can develop. This capacity depends upon viewing music as permeable, recognizing that music influences related ways of knowing, just as related ways of knowing influence music. This book invites teachers to create educational experiences that engage students in exploring an expansive relationship with music. With imaginative examples drawn from diverse musical genres, visual art, poetry, and historical cases, Seeking Connections provides thoughtful principles, models, and instructional strategies to deepen students' understandings of musical works and inspire interdisciplinary inquiry throughout elementary and secondary music programs, as well as settings in music teacher education and professional development.

Janet Revell Barrett is Marilyn Pflederer Zimmerman Endowed Chair Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of several books, including Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching: Growth, Inquiry, Agency, and she is the editor of the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education.