Working in concert: Elementary teachers' experiences in the Curriculum, Music, and Community Project

This dissertation focuses on the experiences of teachers involved in the Curriculum, Music, and Community (CMC) project, a program that began with an effort to support teachers in developing classroom curriculum through empowering forms of professional development utilizing the affective potential of experiences with traditional musicians. The primary means of data collection consisted of a series of individual in-depth conversations with six teachers, three musicians, and an arts council director focusing on the ways in which music, as experienced through the CMC project, affected teachers both personally and professionally. All participants lived and worked in a rural mountain community with a rich musical heritage and had been involved in the project over a period of four years.; This work is framed within a postmodern feminist discourse (Cotterill, 1992; Reinharz, 1983) and utilized adapted forms of the open-ended interviewing technique described by Seidman (1998) and interpretive analysis guidelines developed by Hatch (2002). The final written product was co-constructed through on-going dialogue with participants. Within the discussion of this collaborative relationship with participants, issues of power are examined.; Teachers in the CMC project reported shifts in relationship in the ways they communicated with each other, in the ways they viewed students, in the ways they included members of the community within their classroom, and in the ways students related to each other. Through shared experiences with traditional musicians, students and teachers bridged traditional barriers between lives lived in school and those lived outside of school. In addition, the CMC project seemed to encourage teachers towards a more critical paradigm of conceptualizing, planning, and implementing curriculum. The personal shift of teachers' viewpoints was a critical component of teachers making a move towards more mutual, interactive, and egalitarian instruction and offered a tool for resistance of curriculum mandated by the pressures of high-stakes testing.