Music, Theatre, and Dance

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10323/11895

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“It Goes Like This:” Peer Interaction and Development of Learner Agency in Student-Led Instrumental Chamber Ensembles
(2026-01-01) Czarnik, Kevin Randall; Cunningham, Gregory; Hogle, Lauri; Kattner, Elizabeth
Student-led instrumental chamber music ensembles can provide rich opportunities for learners to share and enrich knowledge using scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) methods that are authentic to themselves. As learners interact in their groups over time, they may create their own shared repertoire of knowledge (Rogoff, 1990; Trevarthen, 1980) which could deepen their communal bonds into a functional community of practice (Wenger, 1998). This could further enrich the conceptual understanding of the members and support the development of learner agency. In this study, I sought to explore the nature of student interaction in peer-led instrumental chamber music ensembles and how those interactions change over time. Qualitative methodology was used with myself acting as teacher-researcher (Kincheloe, 2002). Study groups and video recordings of verbal, physical, and musical interactions provided the data which was transcribed and analyzed for themes related to the social interactions of the ensemble. I discovered that as the ensemble members developed trust for one another, it allowed them to enter their individual Zones of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) to develop their group intersubjectivity (Rogoff, 1990; Trevarthen, 1980) which aided them as they learned their music together. As time progressed, students who were shy in the learning environment developed greater agency and participated at a greater level than before. Several instances of peer interaction also led me to propose that there may be a shared Zone of Proximal Development where multiple learners can interact together in ways that are authentic to their own learning styles that could aid in increasing the intersubjectivity of the full ensemble and promote the development of learner agency.
From Belonging to Becoming: Navigating the Ecosystem of Community, Motivation, and Agency in Secondary Music Classrooms
(2026-01-01) Torrento, Thomas Anthony; Shively, Joseph L; Cunningham, Gregory M; Bennett, Catherine
This study explores how participation in secondary music classrooms functions as a dynamic, relational process through which students develop within interconnected experiences of community, motivation, and agency. Drawing upon sociocultural theory, ecological systems theory, and constructivist perspectives, the study introduces the Music Classroom Ecosystem, a conceptual framework that understands participation as recursive, interconnected, and continually evolving rather than linear or sequential. Using qualitative methodology informed by narrative inquiry and arts-based inquiry, data were collected from twenty students representing grades nine through twelve across two contrasting secondary school music programs. Data sources included individual interviews, focus groups, post-rehearsal observations, researcher reflexive journaling, and metaphor-elicitation activities. Analysis emphasized narrative interpretation, comparative reading, vignette construction, and metaphor interpretation, allowing patterns to emerge across students’ lived experiences. Findings indicate that community, motivation, and agency operate as interdependent dimensions of participation rather than sequential stages. Community provides the relational foundation for participation, motivation sustains engagement through meaningful musical experiences, and agency emerges as students assume increasing ownership and influence within the ensemble. Rather than functioning independently, these dimensions continually shape one another as students revisit them throughout their participation. Participation was therefore best understood as recursive rather than linear, with each return to the community shaped by prior experiences of belonging, meaning, and contribution. The study further suggests that agency is redistributed through relational processes aligned with learned helpfulness, as students who benefit from supportive musical communities increasingly become mentors, leaders, and contributors who sustain those communities over time. This study contributes to music education scholarship by introducing the Music Classroom Ecosystem as a conceptual framework for understanding participation as a dynamic, relational, and recursive developmental process. The framework offers an interpretive lens for understanding how participation develops and is sustained over time, while providing practical implications for designing music learning environments that intentionally cultivate belonging, meaningful participation, agency, and long-term community sustainability.
Music Ensembles and Culturally Responsive Teaching
(2026-01-01) Mayes, Nichole Lauren; VanderLinde, Deborah J; Hogle, Lauri; Mitchell, Michael
This qualitative study investigates the role of music ensemble repertoire selection in the formation of musical identity in high school students. I acted as a teacher-researcher (Kincheloe, 2003) in a constructivist, culturally responsive music classroom (Brooks & Brooks, 2001; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2021; McKoy & Lind, 2023; Wiggins, 2015). Literature on culturally responsive music classrooms has previously focused almost exclusively on popular music, as well as culturally relevant music for specific minority student populations that do not match my own student population (Davis, 2016; Green, 2011; Hess, 2019; McKoy & Lind, 2023; Shaw, 2020). I was curious about the differences for my own students: how does incorporating my students’ cultures into our music ensembles relate to their identities as musicians? How does that further affect their learning?Using a sample of students from two ensembles, a choir and an orchestra, I collected data from interviews, surveys, recorded rehearsals, and classroom assignments. Contrary to my initial expectation that culturally responsive repertoire selection would directly influence musical identity, the findings from my research illustrate how individual mindset, collective culture, and learning experiences, as well as repertoire selection, all affect students’ musical identities. I also identified a part of culturally responsive teaching which I have called intellectually responsive teaching. While culturally responsive teaching in the music classroom allows for a much richer, deeper, and more significant experience for all students, intellectually responsive teaching in the music classroom allows for celebratory and exploratory experiences, challenge and rigor, and joy in making music.
Why Do They Sing? A Qualitative Inquiry into What Motivates an African American Ecclesiastical Community of Singers
(2026-01-01) Taylor, Kwamise; Mitchell, Michael; Martin, Robert A; Kattner, Elizabeth
This qualitative narrative study examines why members of a historically rooted African American ecclesiastical community are motivated to sing. Centering African American ecclesiastical singers as theory-generating voices, the study situates musical motivation within a culturally specific, relational, and spiritually informed context. Through interviews, participant observation, and narrative analysis, participants’ accounts of formative experiences, communal practices, and sacred traditions were examined to understand their impetus to sing. Findings indicate that motivation within this community emerges through an interdependent relational ecology shaped by sacred orientation, inherited musical practice, communal belonging, affirmation, ritual energy, and culturally situated validation. These motivations function as layered and mutually reinforcing rather than discrete or hierarchical constructs. Singing is experienced as spiritual responsibility, cultural continuity, relational participation, and embodied identity within a historically situated worship tradition. The study further introduces the Motown Effect, a culturally embedded motivational dynamic in which historical, geographic, and vi relational proximity contributes to aspirational validation and reinforced musical identity. By centering African American ecclesiastical knowledge and lived experience, this study expands prevailing frameworks of musical motivation and contributes a culturally grounded model of ensemble engagement. Implications extend to choral scholarship, music education, religious studies, and ethnomusicology by affirming that motivation within African American ecclesiastical ensemble contexts is relationally sustained, culturally-transmitted, and historically-situated.
Belonging in a high school marching band community: leadership, mentorship, communication, and positivity in building communities of practice
(2025-01-01) Rose, Jason Matthew; Cunningham, Gregory; Cunningham, Gregory; VanderLinde, Deborah; Hogle, Lauri; Kattner, Elizabeth
American high school marching bands provide an ecosystem of belonging within the high school environment. Marching bands can vary in size and purpose, but provide students with friendship, social opportunities, identity formation, and leadership and life skills opportunities. In this study, I sought to explore the social environment around a high school marching band using a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) framework. The framework allowed me to discover how marching bands operate socially, and how bands produce a family atmosphere within their program. Qualitative methodology was used with myself acting as teacher researcher (Kincheloe, 2002). Focus groups and interviews provided the data which was transcribed and analyzed for themes related to the social innerworkings of the ensemble. What I discovered was that communities of practice fostered a sense of belonging in the students who were participants in themarching band, and that belonging strengthened the community. The cyclical nature of belonging and strong communities of practice was supported by strong leadership, meaningful mentorship, intentional communication, and an overall positive experience, which all resulted in the family atmosphere many marching band members reported to experience (Matthews, 2017). These findings indicate a need for band programs to evaluate their social structures, how they train and model for their student leaders, how they produce effective communication in the face of conflict, and how they create powerfully positive interactions among all members of the ensemble.
Called to the Conversation: A Digital Ethnodrama Exploring Collisions of Calling and Shadow Across a Cohort of Journeys into Professional Musicianhood
(2021-11-17) Sievers-Hunt, Tara S.; VanderLinde, Deborah; Hogle, Lauri A.; Martin, Robert
Called to the Conversation is a digital ethnodrama in three movements. It is the final research product resulting from a series of interviews with nine graduates of a small liberal arts college in Detroit as conducted by their former professor. This dissertation study arose from the question: How might the curriculum of a college music department be meaningfully informed by examining the musicianship journeys of its alumni?While transcribing and exploring the nuclear episodes (McAdams, 1997), stop moments (Fels, 2019), and narrative and resonant threads (Clandinin, 2013) from these participants’ interviews, I discovered that a calling to professional musicianhood (Ansdell, 2016) leading to the pursuit of an undergraduate voice performance degree enkindled a narrative structure similar to a hero’s journey (Vogler, 2020; also Campbell, 1949/2008; Ford, 2000; Frankel, 2010). Specifically, I focused on how the interaction between a Call to Adventure (crossing the Threshold into the Otherworld of higher music education) and their Shadow fear culminated in an Ordeal to be faced before leaving the Otherworld. Methodological, structural, and artistic-theatrical influences behind this work have created a bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005; Berry, 2015) of narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2013; Riessman, 2008), performative ethnography (Denzin, 2003), currere (Pinar, 2019), a/r/tography (Irwin & Springgay, 2008; Leavy, 2009, 2013), verbatim rhythmic transcription, ethnodrama (Saldaña, 2005, 2011a), digital storytelling (Lambert & Hessler, 2020), digital performance (Dixon & Smith, 2007), and narrative monologue—all grounded in a paradigm of critical constructivism (Brooks & Brooks, 1999; Claxton, 1996; Fosnot, 2005; Freire, 1970/2018; Gay, 2018; Kincheloe, 2003, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 2009; McLaren, 2017), a philosophy of musicking (Small, 1990/2016, 1998), and a sense of relational ethics (Clandinin et al., 2018; Ellis, 2007). Engaging the processes of research and artistic creation as an a/r/tographical bricoleur (Irwin et al., 2018; Kincheloe & Berry, 2004; Pinar, 2004a) revealed new understandings of lifelong learning as a self-authoring process (Baxter Magolda, 2004, 2009) —a life curriculum into professional musicianhood. This work poses a number of questions to spark reflective conversations (Renshaw, 2007) about making space for student-musicians’ theories of musicking (Small, 1990/2016, 1998) and their subjective experience within official and operational curricula (Mayes, 2010).
An Interactive Ecosystem of Music Learning: Individual Learning in Small Group Contexts in a Music Classroom
(2022-03-17) Grekin, Joshua David; Wiggins, Jacqueline H; Ricks-Doneen, Julie; Oden, Sherri L; Shambleau, Krista; Carver, Cynthia
In this qualitative study, I explored the relationships between individual and group learning in the context of music ensembles in the classroom. I sought to understand how groups and individuals construct and develop identities and search for power in this context and how the self-esteem, efficacy, and productivity of groups and individuals may be related. As a teacher-researcher (Kincheloe, 2003) in an interactive, interconnected multi-age, constructivist learning environment (Brooks & Brooks, 2001; Fosnot, 1996; Wiggins, 2015) where learners and groups of learners were encouraged to share ideas and knowledge, I examined the musical community from multiple perspectives; focusing separately on the entire school community, small musical ensembles, and individual learners. The relationships among these perspectives, and the experiences of these individuals and groups were the primary focus of this study. Data consisted of extant videos, audio recordings, teacher observation notes, and informal interviews, and were analyzed through a process of identifying and categorizing emergent themes. The findings of this study enabled me to conceptualize the entire musical community at the school as a constantly evolving ecosystem in which every individual and group was influenced by the evolution of the entire ecosystem, and the evolution of the entire ecosystem was influenced by every individual and group. Through this lens, musical groups and musical communities are seen as cohesive and developing entities separate from, and interacting with the individuals who constitute them. Further, I found that ideas, understandings, resources, and innovations resided within the ecosystem and that a robust, multi-perspective awareness of the ecosystem, both in its entirety and of its individual parts, by the learners and music teacher, positively influenced self-efficacy, creativity, development, and growth.

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