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Public Scholarship: How We Got Here, Where We’re Going
Session Topics: Music Theory and Analysis, Pedagogy / Education, AMS, Roundtables
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Presentations | ||
Public Scholarship: How We Got Here, Where We’re Going Traditionally, higher education institutions train graduate students for careers in the professoriate, but access to these careers continues to be limited. As scholars plan for careers, they often forget that careers using their knowledge in the public realm are viable career options. However, universities are often not prepared to either help students orient themselves toward non-academic careers nor are they often equipped with the ability to train students in best practices of public scholarship. To date, only a select number of universities in the United States offer courses in public musicology or public music theory on either the graduate or undergraduate levels. In fact, many people who consider themselves public musicologists or public music theorists came to the field either after earning their PhDs or accidentally during graduate school. As many of them have found, arts-based fields are particularly useful for public-facing work because of their heavy emphasis on culture and what matters to most people (Drivalas & Kezar, 2018). It has been argued that public scholarship training should be a crucial component of graduate school training (Bartha & Burgett, 2014). One of the most exciting parts of working as a public scholar is that there is no standard work environment, making it especially appealing to those outside of academia (Kezar, 2018). |