Music education as/for artistic citizenship in the Field Band Foundation

Abstract

This study views the Field Band Foundation’s activities through the lens of artistic citizenship. The aim of this study is to create an expanded theoretical framework for music education as/for artistic citizenship by analysing the related literature and data gathered from the Field Band Foundation in the Gauteng area. In Another Perspective: Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship Elliott (2012a) gives practitioners three goals to realize if they wish to empower participants to achieve artistic citizenship. These three goals may be summarized as: 1) putting music to work in the community 2) infusing music with an ethic of care and 3) making music as ethical action for social justice. These three goals served as the initial compass during the conception and analysis stages of this study. This study was designed as an instrumental case study. The eclectic data set is made up of literature, interviews, documents, visual and audio-visual data gathered from March 2013 to July 2014. Atlas.ti7 was used to analyse the data. A preliminary theoretical framework was created from the literature. In this framework each of the three themes, expressed through Elliott’s goals, are expanded to include various categories. This framework was used as a priori codes to better understand artistic citizenship as lived in the Field Band Foundation. During the analysis of the data gathered from the Field Band Foundation the categories identified in the literature was expanded to include sub-categories. After analysing the data, gathered in the Field Band Foundation, an expanded theoretical framework for artistic citizenship was created. From the view point of artistic citizenship a community music education project, such as the Field Band Foundation, is shown to empower participants to achieve personal and communal transformation.