'Facing the Music' provides a rich resource for reflection and practice for all those involved in teaching and learning music in culturally diverse environments, from policy makers to classroom teachers. Schippers gradually unfolds the complexities and potential of learning and teaching music 'out of context'.

This open access book highlights the importance of visions of alternative futures in music teacher education in a time of increasing societal complexity due to increased diversity. There are policies at every level to counter prejudice, increase opportunities, reduce inequalities, stimulate change in educational systems, and prevent and counter polarization. Foregrounding the intimate connections between music, society and education, this book suggests ways that music teacher education might be an arena for the reflexive contestation of traditions, hierarchies, practices and structures. The visions for intercultural music teacher education offered in this book arise from a variety of practical projects, intercultural collaborations, and cross-national work conducted in music teacher education. The chapters open up new horizons for understanding the tension-fields and possible discomfort that music teacher educators face when becoming change agents. They highlight the importance of collaborations, resilience and perseverance when enacting visions on the program level of higher education institutions, and the need for change in re-imagining music teacher education programs.

This book addresses the need to rethink the concept and enactment of professionalism in music, and how such concepts underpin professional higher music education. There is an urgent imperative to enable the potential of professional musicians in our contemporary societies to be more fully realised, recognising both intense challenges that are currently threatening some traditional music practices, and significant scope for new practices to be imagined in response to deep veins of societal need. Professionalism encompasses the conduct, aims, values, responsibilities and ongoing development of a practising professional in the field. Professional higher music education engages both with providing future professionals with relevant education in particular craft skills, and with nurturing their visions for their work as artists in future societies. The major focus of the book is on performance traditions that have dominated professional higher education, notably western classical music.

Emerging Solutions for Musical arts Education in South Africa offers peer-reviewed articles prepared for the 2003 Conference of the Pan African Society for Musical Arts Education in Africa held in Kisumu, Maseno, Kenya. Not only does this publication voice the solutions offered by 31 authors from the African continent and beyond, but it presents in a unique and highly accessible fashion the collective voice of the conference participants. True to the spirit of ubuntu - an individual is only a person through other people (their communities) - this publication is a reflection of the essence of an overarching sub-Saharan philosophy; the contents represents a conference where papers were not presented, but where conference participants engaged to discuss solutions for the musical arts on the African continent. While the individual voice has been given its rightful place, the collective voice represents an emergent song composed by the scholarly community in oral fashion. This publication provides insight into the problems of musical arts education in Africa; and solutions for musical arts education.

Produced by an independent group of policy makers, researchers & cultural managers, this book is a contribution to the debate initiated by the World Commission on Culture & Development (UN/Unesco) on the role of culture within society. It addresses various questions such as bridging the global cultural gap, mobilising human resources through culture & living & working in the communications society. Includes case studies, statistics & indicators.

For artists, scholars, researchers, educators and students of arts theory interested in culture and the arts, a proper understanding of the questions surrounding ‘interculturality’ and the arts requires a full understanding of the creative, methodological and interconnected possibilities of theory, practice and research. The International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research provides concise and comprehensive reviews and overviews of the convergences and divergences of intercultural arts practice and theory, offering a consolidation of the breadth of scholarship, practices and the contemporary research methodologies, methods and multi-disciplinary analyses that are emerging within this new field.

With the publication of this remarkable book in 1998, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash instigated a complete epistemological rupture. Grassroots Post-modernism attacks the three sacred cows of modernity: global thinking, the universality of human rights and the self-sufficient individual. Rejecting the constructs of development in all its forms, Esteva and Prakash argue that even alternative development prescriptions deprive the people of control over their own lives, shifting this control to bureaucrats, technocrats and educators. Rather than presuming that human progress fits a predetermined mould, leading towards an increasing homogenization of cultures and lifestyles, the authors argue for a ‘radical pluralism’ that honours and nurtures distinctive cultural variety and enables many paths to the realization of self-defined aspirations. This classic text is essential reading for those looking beyond neoliberalism, the global project and the individual self.