Media Review: Technology and the Gendering of Music Education

Abstract

Armstrong, Victoria. Technology and the of Music Education. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. xiii + 157 pp. Index, hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4094-1784-2, $99.95. The exposure and critique of gender remains a central project of contemporary academia, and Victoria Armstrong's new book serves as an important and valuable contribution. The book presents an empirical study of gender in a London music education program. Grounded in feminist theory as well as science and technology studies, it is derived from a PhD dissertation supervised in part by Lucy Green, whose 1997 book, Music, Gender, Education, remains a landmark study in the field. The primary thesis of the book, presented on page 2, can be summarized as a clash between two areas that have been gendered: music education and technology. Technological discourse favors and has been heavily shaped by masculinity, while music education has traditionally been a feminine subject. Recent trends to include more technology, combined with more rock music and other informal music--more often identified with masculinity--may shape the values, practices, and participation in music education. As the technological focus has been increasing since the late 1990s, what we could be witnessing is a shift from a traditionally 'feminine' subject to a subject that has increasingly masculine connotations (3). This summary might suggest that technology is deterministic and the inevitable results are caused by hardware and software, but that is a position explicitly argued against in the book. Drawing from works by Raymond Williams as well as Sherry Turkle, Armstrong regards technology as always fully social, and she properly locates the bias typically solely ascribed to technology within the culture that organizes the technology. Going beyond a description of technology merely as a tool, she defines technology as a system or network that includes human agency. This view helps to orient the book, keeping devices and people always in relation: Throughout the book, I will adopt the term music technology rather than music ICT (and will refer to ICT only when other texts make explicit use of this term) as it better represents how the use of digital music technology (such as computers, minidisk players and music notation software or sequencing packages) requires and produces knowledge, while also reflecting the cultures and values of the social context in which it is used. (8) The findings of this book originated in an empirical study carried out at four secondary schools from January to June of 2003. The students were ages fifteen to eighteen and studying for GCSE or A-level music; the total number of student and teacher participants was nearly a hundred, with an equal split between males and females. In addition to her observations, Armstrong conducted thirty-minute semistructured interviews with two boys and two girls from each class she observed, resulting in thirty-two interviews. She also conducted one-hour interviews with each of the eleven teachers. Selections from these interviews are presented throughout the book in a way that brings to life the participants' thoughts and opinions. The empirical study is presented and explored primarily in chapters 3 through 7. Chapter 3, Gendered Cultures in the Music Technology Classroom, explores and documents how gendered practices produce outcomes such as the production of the technological culture in the classroom in ways that marginalize female contributions. Chapter 4, Gendering Technological Expertise, explores how notions of expertise were produced in these classrooms along gendered lines, often by silencing feminine knowledge despite the knowledge and skills of the females in those classrooms. Moving into the area of the music composed via technology, chapter 5, Gendering the Musical Idea, describes differences between boys and girls and how their personal feelings relate to the compositions they produce. …