OU's CARMU hosts conference for music educators March 11-13

By Dan Bodene, contributing writer

Oakland University’s Center for Applied Research in Musical Understanding (CARMU) is sponsoring a conference for music educators March 11-13 at The Royal Park Hotel in Rochester.

Title of the conference is “Arts-based Research in Music Education: A Professional Development Research Conference.” 

Roughly 20-25 presenters and attendees are expected at the conference. Most are from the Oakland University community, but some out-of town guests will also attend and present, said Dr. Deborah Blair, OU assistant professor of Music Education. “It’s a professional development conference for graduate and doctoral students and faculty who are interested in arts-based educational research,” she said. “Presenters will have immediate opportunities for response and discussion.”

The keynote speaker for the conference is Dr. Margaret Macintyre Latta, associate professor of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska. Latta is co-editor of the International Journal of Education & The Arts. She also is a faculty member of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Latta will present two keynote addresses: “Aesthetic Inquiry: About, Within, Without, and Through Repeated Visits” on Thursday, March 11, and “Curriculum as Medium for Sense Making: Giving Expression to Teaching/Learning Aesthetically” on Friday, March 12.

Tom Barone and Elliot Eisner, leaders in arts-based research in education, describe it this way: “Arts-based research is defined by the presence of certain aesthetic qualities or design elements that infuse the inquiry and its writing. Although these aesthetic elements are in evidence to some degree in all educational research activity, the more pronounced they are, the more the research may be characterized as arts-based."

These elements may include the creation of a virtual reality, the presence of ambiguity, the use of expressive language, the use of contextualized and vernacular language, the promotion of empathy, the personal signature of the researcher/writer, and, the presence of aesthetic form.

CARMU sponsors events every year – some on an international scale, some smaller, Blair said. “I attended Dr. Latta’s session at the 2009 AERA conference, and invited her to come to our campus. She was the focus for developing this conference.”

Latta’s presentations should give educators opportunities to learn valuable techniques, Blair said. “She will present exemplars of arts-based educational research and explain the process, so we can learn how to engage the process in our own work.”