Written and enacted policies in undergraduate music education admissions

Abstract

Undergraduate music education programs are the most common pathway for someone seeking to become a music teacher. Admission into preservice programs may be a barrier for minority students. We conducted a collective case study and qualitative content analysis to examine the written and enacted policies of music education admissions at institutions within the BIG 10 academic conference. Utilizing Richerme’s feminine and poststructural extension of cosmopolitan ethics as a frame to consider our analysis, we considered how written policies present institutional priorities and compared them to enacted policies of local stakeholders. The results of this investigation highlight the varied interpretations of institutional and professional priorities, as well as the difficulty of determining responsibility and enacting change on the local level. Implications from this study include recommendations for changes to practice and policy, considerations for curricular shifts, and a discussion of ways to disrupt the seemingly iron-clad reproduction of a homogenous music education field that continues to exclude bodies and musicks that do not conform.

Keywords:

• Music education
• preservice teachers
• undergraduate admissions
• written and enacted policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We utilize the term dis/ability to counter the emphasis on the person being represented by what they cannot do, and to disrupt notions of the perceived permanence of disability (Annamma et al., 2016).

2 NASM refers to the National Association for Schools of Music, the organization responsible for providing accredidation to university music programs (National Associaion of Schools of Music, 2023).