J. Scott Goble

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of British Columbia

In this paper, we highlight the centrality of process in Indigenist community-based participatory research in music education to offer new methodological insights, using a recent investigation that employed conference as research method as a case study. From our perspective as university researchers who are non-Indigenous or Indigenous but not to t...

Over its twenty-one years, ACT has been a leading voice in music education when new areas of scholarship have emerged. As ACT’s co-editors for the past five years, we are proud of what the journal represents and its continued growth. Despite suspicion and disparagement in the early 2000s from mainstream print journals and university tenure and prom...

Recent curriculum policy changes in British Columbia (BC) require that educators in all subject areas—including music—embed local Indigenous knowledge, pedagogies, and worldviews in their classes. Yet facilitating such decolonizing cross-cultural music education activities requires knowledge that music educators may not currently possess. We use fo...

In this chapter, Canadian authors Anita Prest and Scott Goble use sociological lenses to illustrate how, as non-Indigenous researchers, they learned to immerse themselves in local Indigenous knowledge(s) in western Canada. Such learning enabled them to reframe their investigations to reflect the ontological and epistemological orientations of the c...

Sociological Thinking in Music Education: International Intersections presents sociological thinking about music teaching and learning as important social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural ways of being. At the book’s heart is the intersection between theory and practice where readers gain glimpses of intriguing social phenomena as liv...

How might an understanding of neoliberalism and its relationship to music education be important for music educators and their work? To answer this question, my editorial recounts the emergence of modern liberalism in the writings of philosophers during the European industrial revolution of the 18th century, then describes the 20th century beginnin...

In 2015, the British Columbia (BC) Ministry of Education mandated that local Indigenous knowledge, pedagogy, and worldviews be embedded in all K-12 curricula, but most BC music teachers have been unable to fulfill this directive because they are unfamiliar with Indigenous cultural practices. We designed this multiple case study, informed by Indigen...

In this paper, we explore challenges in conveying the culturally constructed meanings of local Indigenous musics and the worldviews they manifest to students in K-12 school music classes, when foundational aspects of the English language, historical and current discourse, and English language habits function to thwart the transmission of those mean...

Philosophers of music education presently find themselves suspended between modernism’s universalist convictions and post-modernism’s cultural relativist insights. In Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (1995), David Elliott challenged longstanding conceptions of “music education as aesthetic education” to proffer a praxial philosoph...

What's So Important About Music Education? presents a new philosophy of music education for the United States, rooted in history and current perspectives from ethnomusicology. J. Scott Goble explores the societal effects of the nation's foundations in democracy and capitalism, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the rise of recor...

I approach the notion that music teachers can affect musical culture from the perspective of pragmatist philosophy, specifically that of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who is widely regarded as the founder of pragmatism. Despite relative obscurity during his own lifetime, Peirce has had a major, if indirect, influence on philosophy over much o...

Many individuals now living in industrialized societies experience music primarily as entertainment via radio, television, and computer media. Yet for persons living in many "local" communities, engagement in community-particular forms of music is experienced as a vital means of cultural validation and change. Some indigenous peoples, those for who...

The music education profession in the U.S. underwent significant changes in its philosophical foundations in the second half of the 20th century. From the launch of aesthetic education during the 1950s in response to long-held functional values to the appearance of praxial philosophy during the 1990s in response to the aesthetic movement, the profe...