This Is My Truth, Now Tell Me Yours

Thirty Years later, and still ‘many have been resistant to defining [community music], believing that such a statement would not do justice to the endeavour of community music’ (Higgins, 2013)

'‘During my time studying this field of practice, I have been offered various conflicting accounts of community music’s development by professionals who were part of the community arts movement at this time. From one professional I was informed that there is evidence that community music tied in with the punk movement and was fighting against elitism and inaccessibility in music. From a different professional I was told that there has been evidence that community music tied into the experimentalist movement, fighting for creativity over learning pre-written repertoire. I have also been offered various other theories and opinions on the birthplace of community music as a movement, of which there were apparently four distinct and sparsely distributed locations, all claiming that ‘they did it first’ (Ben Imrye, 2012)

“When humans enter into dialogue there is a new space of meaning that opens up between them and includes them within it. The external ‘objective’ view that locates things in their proper place is always ‘monologic’ because it assumes a single fixed perspective. The internal view that takes the other seriously is ‘dialogic’ because, when experienced from inside dialogues, meaning always assumes at least two perspectives held together in creative tension. Without this creative tension over a gap of difference there would be no experience of meaning.” (Wegerif, 2012)

'Bakhtin describes how there is always a ‘third party’ in any dialogue between two people. He refers to this as the ‘superaddressee’ or the witness that you are addressing beyond the actual person you seem to be addressing.'

(Wegerif, 2012)

Artist as, 'facilitator and fixer, celebrant and stage manager, a visionary linking the past and the future, and a shamanic poet, the revelator of layers of perception and the holder of what used to be called spiritual energy. Equally of course this kind of artist would also acknowledge the artist in us all and offer testament to the innate creativity recurring in every generation and every community where the intuitive is given freedom.' (John Fox, 2009)

"Of all the tools for cultural and pedagogical intervention in human development and learning, talk is the most pervasive in its use and powerful in its possibilities. Talk vitally mediates the cognitive and cultural spaces between adult and child, among children themselves, between teacher and learner, between society and the individual, between what the child knows and understands and what he or she has yet to know and understand. Language not only manifests thinking but also structures it, and speech shapes the higher mental processes necessary for so much of the learning that takes place, or ought to take place, in school." (Alexander, 2008)

'Whereas Vygotsky proposed a limited version of dialogic space as a tool within the larger project of education, new research evidence suggests that dialogic space is not simply a tool within education but, more radically, it should be understood as the context of education. To put this another way: education is a matter of improving the quality of dialogue from within dialogue, it is not, as Vygotsky seems to suggest, about using dialogues as a means to achieve an end that is outside of dialogue.' (Wegerif, 2012)

‘In a spoken dialogue between two human beings, one waits until the other has finished what [they have] to say before replying or commenting on it. In music, two voices are in dialogue simultaneously, each one expressing itself to the fullest while at the same time listening to the other’ (Barenboim 2009, 20)

‘If it is possible to consider the diversity of [Participatory Arts] practices and approaches as constituting some kind of ‘community of practice’ then it is an evolving, organic and emergent one, which changes with its constituent population, their artistic concerns and interests, and the participant communities they engage with through the work. The diversity of the many different and individual perspectives involved is always bound to be something that eludes absolute definition or rigid conceptualisation’

(Camlin, ArtWorks Peer Artist Learning Project, 2012, 9)

‘explore a way of thinking about pedagogy derived from dialogic theories of education and, in particular, consider the significance of creating 'dialogic space' as a dimension of a pedagogy for music’ (Finney 2013, 3)

'This is My Truth, Now Tell Me Yours...'

CPD and

Training

Contribution of

CM to music education and

wider education

'we cannot really facilitate a dialogic space unless we have an appreciation of what it is like to be in one.'

(Camlin, 2015)

Dichotomies

resolved through

dialogue

http://prezi.com/k4ksdfegwo0q/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Participatory

Arts

Dialogues

Music as

dialogue

‘meaning always assumes at least two perspectives held together in...

Education

'through'

dialogue

Creative Tension

(Wegerif 2012)

Education 'for'

dialogue

Dialogic

Space

DIALOGUE

resolves this contradiction

A form of conceptualisation where resistance and ‘creative tension’ is vital

Socratic

Questioning

“The goal of Socratic questioning is to allow [people] to generate their own solutions, to facilitate a process of self-discovery. From this perspective, [questioners] assume that they do not know the answer to their [subject’s] problems and they attempt to discover the solution together.” (Carey & Mullen, 2004)

Every community musician invented community music

Being Human:

Self-actualisation

Resistance to Conceptualisation

‘in refusing to analyse our work, and place that analysis into a political context, the community arts movement has placed itself in a position of absurd, and unnecessary, weakness’

(Owen Kelly, 1983)