The Glenn Korff School of Music is hosting the 2013 Committee on Institutional Cooperation Conference on Music Education Oct. 16-18.
The CIC, established in 1958, is the academic consortium of the Big Ten member universities plus the University of Chicago. The music education departments from CIC institutions meet annually to discuss issues of particular importance to the field. Faculty and doctoral students from member institutions will be in attendance.
“It really gives an opportunity for research dialogue,” said Rhonda Fuelberth, associate professor of choral music education and co-area head of music education. “It creates an incredible opportunity for creating a sense of community within the music education research community and provides great networking opportunities for our Ph.D. students and faculty that we hope will lead to future collaborations and sharing of curricular initiatives and research projects and agendas.”
Robert Woody, associate professor and co-area head of music education, said he has already seen the fruits of this collaboration in his own work.
“Having gotten to know the people at these institutions through the conferences and then nurturing those relationships online through Facebook, Twitter and other means, I’ve been able to keep in touch with these colleagues and collaborated on a project with someone from Illinois,” Woody said. “I also taught via Skype in the last year at both Michigan State and Penn State. I really like the collaboration that comes from our connection to the CIC.”
Plenary speakers for the conference include Patricia Shehan Campbell, Robert Duke and Susan Swearer.
Campbell teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in music education, including music for children, world music pedagogy, sociology of music and research methods at the University of Washington. In 2010 she was appointed chair of the ethnomusicology program. She was named Donald E. Petersen Professor of Music in 2000. She will speak Oct. 17.
Duke is the Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Professor and head of music and human learning at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the most recent recipient of MENC’s Senior Researcher Award and has directed national research efforts under the sponsorship of such organizations as the National Plano Foundation and the International Suzuki Institute. He will speak Oct. 17.
Swearer, UNL professor of school psychology, is a seasoned psychologist who specializes in clinical and forensic services. She has more than 20 years of clinical experience and more than 15 years experience as an expert witness in civil and criminal court cases. Swearer leads a new research board to advise Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation on its youth empowerment and tolerance programs. She will speak on “Bullying Prevention: Creating Caring Communities Through Pop Culture” on Oct. 18.
The conference will also feature a set of discussions on topics related to curricular innovation and research collaboration that will be introduced by a series of TED-style talks that will include Steinhart Professor of Music Education Glenn Nierman on “Standards 2.0—They’re Not Just for Identifying Outcomes Anymore.”
The doctoral students will also have the opportunity to share research projects in various forms through poster sessions.
“For the first time, they’ve been given the option to present a digital poster session, and a third of them have chosen that option,” Fuelberth said. “That’s a new way to share their research and their projects.”
John Richmond, director of UNL’s School of Music, completed his doctorate at Northwestern University, so he attended the CIC Conference on Music Education while he was there and even hosted the student activities when the conference took place in Evanston, Ill.
“I remember how impressive the whole thing was,” Richmond said. “While I was certainly inspired to be at Northwestern and go to a great place, when I realized the number of great places across the CIC who were doing important work and had on their faculty people whose names I knew only because of my required readings in my doctoral program, it really was exciting and humbling, so it was a thrill to become a part of that family again when Nebraska became a part of the Big Ten and a part of the CIC.”
Getting to know colleagues’ research is an important part of the conference.
“It is a way to set the stage for inter-institutional collaboration, and I hope this will be a moment of pivot for the consortium as we really ramp that up,” Richmond said. “Not only because there’s expertise we can draw on across institutions, but I also think there is an opportunity that seldom comes to music education—or anything in music—to develop a group of investigators across the member schools and then pursue outside funding from federal and private sources in support of that research, which would have a kind of gravitas that might be absent if only a faculty member from a single institution were to pursue that kind of funding model. We see that being done already in the sciences with great success. It seems only logical that we should borrow a page from that playbook and see if we can make that benefit arts and arts education going forward.”
The conference is invitation-only and open only to faculty and doctoral students from CIC member institutions. For more information or a full schedule of events, go to http://go.unl.edu/cicmusic.
