Arts Education

Music

The Landscape of Music

The Manitoba Music Framework is conceived as a full landscape of knowledge where educators and students meet in the work of active, embodied music learning. Educators and students are invited into the living field of music education through a curriculum designed to place students in the dynamic, complex, working culture of music. The Music Framework is built using four interrelated essential learning areas, connected to the student music maker at the core. Way-finding through the music environment is provided by connected sets of general and specific learning outcomes for the essential learning areas.

"Curricula for today's world use ecological metaphors" (WNCP 6) to convey the notion that knowledge is dynamic and always in the process of being constructed. Curriculum frameworks are conceived as complex, organic networks organized into living fields or landscapes, rather than as fragmented pieces of knowledge pieced together in a linear fashion. Learning in the landscape of music means learning the complexities and ways of the discipline while learning how to do in the discipline. Learning the landscape of music, or coming to know and do in the discipline, means the ability to enter into, learn the way around, participate fully in, and make a contribution to the culture of music (WNCP).

Music learning is understood to be a journey into the landscape of music education. The Music Framework provides multiple locations for students to enter and continue lifelong transformative travels in the music landscape. students may have various trajectories through a music landscape that creates "a unique point of view, a location with specific possibilities for enhancing the learning capability of [their] sphere of participation" (Wenger 197). Each student's unique identity, and the individual perspective it offers, is a gift to the world (Wenger 197).