Music education conference focuses on race and equity issues

The University of Wisconsin–Madison will host the first conference of CRÈME International, the International Consortium on Equity in Music Education, from Oct. 20-23.

The conference will assemble scholars, researchers, educators, artists and activists around the theme of “Race, Erasure and Equity in Music Education,” with keynote addresses, paper presentations and roundtable sessions. It is co-sponsored by the School of Music, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Division of Continuing Studies.

Headlining the conference are three distinguished scholars, all of whom have a past or present connection with UW–Madison. Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies. Her keynote address is titled “Learning to Sing Our Sacred Songs: Discontinuities and Disjunctures in Music(s) In and Out of School.”

Cameron McCarthy is University Scholar and Communications Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition, he holds appointments in the Institute of Communications Research and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He received the Ph.D. degree in curriculum and instruction from UW–Madison. His keynote address is titled “Reconstructing Race and Education in the Class Conquest of the City and the University in the Era of Neoliberalism and Globalization.”

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is professor of sociology at Duke University with affiliations in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and African and African American Studies. He received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from UW–Madison. Bonilla-Silva’s keynote address is titled “The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Amerika.”

Ladson-Billings, McCarthy and Bonilla-Silva will lead a panel discussion at the conclusion of the day on Thursday, Oct. 21.

Current and former music education faculty at UW–Madison who will present papers include the three conference co-chairs: Julia Eklund Koza, professor; Teryl Dobbs, assistant professor; and Deborah Bradley, assistant professor from 2006-2010 and currently adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.

For more information about the CRÈME conference and the participants, visit the website or contact Julia Koza at koza@education.wisc.edu.

The conference will overlap with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) 2010 Music Education Research Conference, which is hosted annually by the Big Ten universities in rotation.

Among other things, CRÈME International seeks to generate, promote and disseminate research on equity and social justice issues in music education.