Response to Elvira Panaiotidi, "The Nature of Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts in Music Education"

Abstract

Elvira Panaiotidi has delivered a very useful and appealing paper on the topic of how the music education community decides it is time to change the way it thinks and acts. Her primary focus is whether the concept of proposed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reasonably explains how change occurs in music education theory and practice and, if not, whether it can be modified so that it does. Following Peter Abbs' account of paradigm shifts in arts education, she proposes that paradigm shifts occur when methods of inquiry change even if what is being analyzed does not change. More specifically, paradigm shifts involve gradual transformations such that certain principles and terminology are carried over from the previous paradigm to the new one, and change at a slower rate than the methodologies adopted to make sense of them. Such discrepancy creates the kind of communicative discord she alludes to in her introduction: the aesthetic/praxial debate. Her further analysis of Abbs' argument leads her to conclude that the paradigm shifts he describes in arts education are different in kind from those intended by Kuhn. They apparently lack conceptual modification, or conversion experience, and seem motivated by the need for increasingly comprehensive explanations of artistic behavior and thinking. Panaiotidi's synopsis of Kuhn's original criteria for paradigms reminded me