The Music Educator as a Policy Analyst

This chapter is the most practical and instructive of the book’s chapters. It aims to delineate very concrete ways of looking at accepted tools, spaces, and practices in policy. The chapter presents music educators with an entry point to this policy vocabulary. The chapter admonishes the reader that these are only tools, however, and as such their yield is dependent on our capacity to discern, contextualize, and frame. While the chapter describes policy language, instruments, and tools, it avoids the misperception that technical acuity is a necessary first step, one that allows one to enter the realm of policy. Such a view inevitably delays policy participation and discourages policy thinking. Knowing the context is the only prerequisite for policy engagement.

Small Actions Go a Long Way! The Day-to-Day of Policy-Minded Music Educators

This chapter suggests that policy practice must be established as a valued, worthy, and feasible arena of daily action for music educators. It argues that we can support this disposition by (a) working to amplify our capacity to “hear” others, (b) strengthening dispositions toward collaborative work and participative action, and (c) fostering a sense of autonomy that allows educators to expand our ability to enact our speech and see that speech rendered credible by others. The chapter is intended as an invitation for educators to think of any outstanding program, any supportive and inviting work environment, or any innovative practice they can remember and ask these questions: How did they get started? What factors led to their establishment? Why did they thrive? Finally, the chapter provides several examples of policy work done by music educators, illustrating how a framing disposition is critical in the enactment of change.

A New Kind of Teacher Activism

This chapter explores policy as a form of critical pedagogy. It argues that there is something highly pedagogical about the formation and enactment of policy knowhow. The chapter investigates three central concepts of critical pedagogy—namely, conscientization, participation, and activism—and recasts them within the policy context. Using criticality as a parameter, the chapter links policy knowhow to the formation of critical leadership skills, with the aim of dissuading a view that sees policy as a “closed preserve of the formal government apparatus of policymaking” in which teachers are written out of the policy process.

Becoming Part of the Policy Process

In this chapter, a number of issues discussed throughout the book return to the forefront. The chapter presents a final argument as to how policy knowhow is connected to an effort to bring synergy to the professional work of music educators. The chapter further explores these synergies and how they are present in the daily work of music teachers, offering some strategic ways to consider policy as a practice. The main message in this chapter is that schools and communities of learning are interdependent systems, dependent on what our contexts demand and offer. The chapter invites music teachers not to “close their doors” but rather to move toward local policy participation, discovering how they may contribute to the educational environment that surrounds them.

Policy Beyond Traditional Walls

This chapter is framed from an entrepreneurship standpoint. The aim is to offer an interpretative view of policy as an ongoing affair that is not only about advice/influence or implementation/resistance but also, and perhaps as important, concerned with the construction and maintenance of relations among stakeholders. The chapter presents entrepreneurship as a kind of grass-roots disposition, demonstrating how it may become an important tool to push back and respond to external pressures, such as intensification of labor and performativity, as they continue to affect educational spaces. The chapter offers an analysis of music entrepreneurship, using multiple examples to highlight how they have acted as policy practices, generating changes in music education language, thinking, and practice.

The Need for Theory

This chapter establishes the need for theorizing and explores how policy has been conceptually developed in the literature. It traces the relationship between policy thinking and practice, making the case for how theories developed or employed by scholars are used to help, clarify, justify, and explain practice—not to mystify. Further, it develops the notion of policy knowhow placing it within two sides of the same coin, namely, conceptual design and structured action. Last, the chapter delineates distinctions between traditional and progressive views on policy, exploring how these apply to music education policy scholarship.

The Impact and Importance of Policy in the Lives of Music Teachers

This chapter introduces the reader to the purpose of this book, which is to facilitate the development of a policy identity in the field of music education so that music educators can be confident contributors to the policy process. The chapter articulates the ways in which policy can be formal or informal, obvious or subtle, stated or unstated, implicit or explicit. It demonstrates that policy starts with ideas, exemplifying how we may impact the process of adopting, implementing, and assessing said ideas. It shows how policy’s purposes are manifold, with practices that are deeply contextual and linked to constituencies and their interests. It argues, at the same time, that the consequences of policy can be acutely felt and are ethically far-reaching. The chapter, in sum, introduces policy as a complex terrain but also highlights tools for action.