Elizabethtown College Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, Professor of Music and Director of Music Education Kevin Shorner-Johnson recently co-authored a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Care and Music Education.
Shorner-Johnson’s chapter, which was co-written with Martha Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies at Scripps College, and Daniel Shevock, music teacher at Keystone Central School District, focuses on forms of care in music education, including ecological and indigenous forms of care. The authors encourage and challenge educators to think of care as a mutual, interdependent act.
“I find the field of care ethics to be very relevant to what it means to be a teacher and to our thinking about ecological care,” Shorner-Johnson said. “As a teacher, I am asked to care for the students in my class. Our chapter asks us to enter ecological relations where we are caring and cared for at the same time.”
The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education was published by Oxford University Press and includes a team of 70 authors – several of whom have appeared as guests on Shorner-Johnson’s popular Music & Peacebuilding podcast.
“Music and the arts in general are a way of exploring empathy and feeling,” Shorner-Johnson said. “This sense of empathy and care is at the heart of our approach to peacebuilding in our Master of Music Education program at Elizabethtown College.”
The book addresses ways in which music teachers and students interact as co-learners and forge authentic relationships with one another through shared music-making, while also focusing on student-educator interactions within the music education space, with both research and practical implications.
