Music Education Special Interest Group
Research Seminar Announcement
Imperatives and Challenges for Popular Music Education in Mainland China
Professor Wai-Chung Ho, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Tuesday 26th November 2013
1-2pm
Room: tbc
Further details from Lucy Green, l.green2@ioe.ac.uk
All are welcome
Since the 1990s mainland China's modernisation and globalisation,
together with its transition to a market economy, have created new
imperatives for, and challenges to the school curriculum. Many reforms
have been initiated to improve the quality of basic education in
China, including areas such as the school curriculum, material
incentives, teachers' professional development, and students' personal
interests. As a result, the 2011 reform of the Curriculum Standards
for Primary Education and Junior Secondary Education mark the first
time that the school curriculum has officially included popular songs.
With particular reference to Beijing and Shanghai, this empirical
study explores Chinese adolescents' popular music preferences in their
daily lives, and to what extent and in what ways they prefer learning
popular music, rather than more traditional music curricula, in
schools. Data were drawn from questionnaires completed by 2,971
students in Beijing, 1,730 secondary students in Shanghai, interviews
with 55 students in Beijing and 60 Shanghai students between 2011 and
2012. The findings can be interpreted as indicating that music and
music education, whether in formal or informal settings, are complex
cultural constructs that are reinvented through the intertwined
interplay between different actors' preferred musical styles in their
multileveled cultural world. This study examines the challenges that
mainland China faces concerning the promotion of popular music in
school music education, by moving beyond oppositions between culture
and power, tradition and modernity, the global and the national, and
the pedagogical issues resulting from the introduction of popular
music in contemporary China's education.
Wai-Chung Ho completed her PhD in music education at the Institute of
Education, University of London, in 1996. She is a professor in the
Department of Music at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research
interests are the sociology of music, school music education, and the
comparative study of East Asian music education. Her research has
focused on inter-linked areas of development, education policy and
reform in school education, as well as values in education across
school curricula in Chinese countries, including mainland China, Hong
Kong and Taiwan. Wai-Chung is a frequent contributor to leading
international research journals in education, music education and
cultural studies, and has been published in journals such as the
British Journal of Music Education, British Journal of Educational
Technology, International Journal of Music Education, and Music
Education Research. Her book, School Music Education and Social Change
in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (Brill, 2011) examines recent
reforms and innovations in school music education within these
changing Chinese societies, and compares, from a sociopolitical
perspective, how music education in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei has
adjusted to the forces of globalisation, localization and
Sinofication. In addition, Wai-Chung has examined pedagogical issues
concerning the introduction of popular music in contemporary
education, as well as the unique challenges facing mainland China's
promotion of popular music in school music education.
Best wishes
Trijntje on behalf of Lucy Green.
Administrator
Institute of Education
Tel 020 7612 6346
