LAUREN KAPALKA RICHERME
Indiana University (USA)
December 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (7): 1–6 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.7.1
The call for this special issue was inspired by the June 2024 Poetry Magazine, in which Carl Phillips and Meghan O’Rourke wrote essays on individual words, loneliness and ambivalence, respectively. Interrogating ambivalence, O’Rourke engaged with the crossroads central to Robert Frost’s (1916) poem “The Road Not Taken.” Referencing Frost’s famous line that the road less traveled “has made all the difference,” O’Rourke (2024) states, “That line is trickily ambivalent: is the difference good or bad?” (249). She later explains that despite a general “ambivalence about ambivalence” the word “also speaks for the many selves we could be, if only. It is the voice of both our lives and our unled lives” (25). Reading these statements, I felt struck by the idea that a single word could cause me to contemplate my own time and place.
As a mid-career scholar, teacher, musician, and mother, I know that each sustained endeavor has opened some doors while closing others. At times I feel loss at considering the other roads I could have traveled or gratitude for the privilege and luck I have had on my chosen path, but often I am ambivalent. Yet, I bristle at the word ambivalent; I feel the urge to loudly declare that music educators and students should never feel ambivalent about their decisions. However, sustaining a passionate criticality in multiple aspects of one’s life can feel difficult and draining. Perhaps I am ambivalent about more than I like to admit. If nothing else, reading about ambivalence brought these otherwise hidden tensions forward and encouraged further contemplation. I wondered: What words encapsulate how others make sense of their current time and place?
A single word can speak not only to an individual’s ephemeral socio-political positionality but to a culture’s broader experience of a time and place. As noted in the call for proposals: “In the United States, groovy, cowabunga, oh snap, and sustainability each invoke a particular historical moment and culture. In music education, words such as aesthetic, praxial, modern band, and culturally sustaining pedagogy speak to contextually situated professional trends and values.
More broadly, pervasive words indicate and ultimately restrict what is valued and legitimized within social spheres, creating inclusions and exclusions that can prove detrimental for certain individuals and ways of knowing and being (Foucault 1980). Words can also become overused, losing their initially disruptive impact. At present, terms like diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice may fall into this category.”
As I write this editorial in October 2025, I am amazed at how much has changed from when I authored the call for proposals in July 2024. Looking back, I yearn for the days in which “diversity” was overused rather than weaponized and censored. Although MayDay Colloquium 36 keynote Quentin Wheeler-bell (2024) notes that diversity initiatives do not necessarily address the primary concerns of most Black individuals, the recent closure of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices and cancelation of diversity education initiatives throughout the United States undermines key aspects of the MayDay Group’s Action Ideals and sets a troubling precedent that may spread internationally.
Perhaps only in on focusing on any one moment does the fleeting nature of time and potential for music education to occur differently—for better or for worse—become apparent. When the United States government defunds climate change research (e.g., Temple 2025), readers cannot help but hear calls for “sustainability” differently than before such action. In addition to sustainability, the authors in this issue articulate the importance of love and curiosity while, in typically ACT style, they critique explicit educational objectives, superficial inclusion efforts, and uncritical calls for strength in moments of tragedy.
Focusing on language necessitates considerations not just about individual words but their ordering. The sequence in which an editor places articles within an issue can impact readers’ experiences. The juxtaposed individual contributions form a narrative of sorts, and the editor has a responsibility to consider the story they tell, including its relation to the present moment.
Should I have edited this issue in 2024, I may have told an optimistic story, perhaps starting with curiosity and ending with love. Or perhaps I would have begun with the critiques of inclusion, explicit, and “Spartan Strong” and ended with sustainability. For me, this present moment resists both an optimistic way forward and a clear narrative arc; it is uncertain, uneasy, and uncharted. Yet, ambivalence is not an option, and I take seriously Tatyana C. Louis-Jacques’ call to focus “less about what [educators] should not do and instead on what they should do.” As such, I begin with the word love followed by the other “should do” words of curiosity and sustainability. I follow with the critiques of strength and inclusion and end with the explicitness unique to modernity.
In “A Pedagogy of Love in Music Education,” Louis-Jacques provides an alternative to discourse understanding love within teaching and learning as abstract, idealistic, or inappropriate. Drawing on scholarship by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Erich Fromm, and Thich Nhat Hahn, Louis-Jacques posits that loving educators “work to nourish and express the best parts of themselves and create a space in which others can do likewise.” While arguing that love can be taught and practiced, Louis-Jacques clarifies that love cannot necessarily overcome the ills of educational standardization or systemic inequities. Louis-Jacques ultimately imagines a multifaceted pedagogy of love that manifests through “working with students, interacting with colleagues, and creating loving environments in which all feel welcome and valued.”
Also providing love a central place in the current historical moment, Marissa Silverman examines feminist curiosity “in combination with wonder and generosity, loving and not knowing.” Silverman demonstrates curiosity through her humble, intimate approach to inquiry. She advocates that curious listening can promote inclusivity and equity while simultaneously acknowledging uncertainty and the provisional nature of knowledge construction. Emphasizing multiple moments, Silverman describes: “Feminist curiosity resists erasures of history and instead commits to open and honest inquiry in search of a fragile future through querying together with one another.” This foregrounding of interpersonal relations recalls Louis-Jacques’ assertion that loving dispositions can be “experienced and strengthened within a loving community of practice.”
Centering the word sustainability, Heidi Westerlund, Tuulikki Laes, and Guadalupe López-Íñiguez likewise hint that love might play a role in contemporary teaching and learning. In their final video, they imagine how music education might “connect with society,” serving not as “a gatekeeper, but an imaginative, responsible agent who loves people, as well as music.” They advocate that music educators resist political neutrality and neoliberal logic, instead engaging reflexively and responsibly with the complexities inherent in current national and international sustainability issues. Drawing on systems thinking, they encourage practitioners to “reach beyond the narrow purposes of technical rationality and self-centered aims that preserve the status quo of the system towards a new social contract….,” thus providing music education a key role in more for-reaching communal endeavors.
While Westerlund, Laes, and López-Íñiguez understand sustainability “as the twenty-first century buzzword par excellence,” Saleel Adarkar Menon and Juliet Hess problematize the fleeting phrase “Spartan Strong,” which Michigan State University administrators used in the hopes of encouraging resiliency following a horrific instance of gun violence on campus. Proposing a human-centered, trauma-informed approach, Menon and Hess argue that “reframing expressions that promote dirty pain and a quick return to normalcy constitutes both a refusal to move on with business as usual and a deep engagement with our human emotions.” They also detail a resultant public music event that “showcased music spanning a range of potential emotional responses,” including mourning, reflection, beauty, and comfort. Importantly, Menon and Hess demonstrate how music educators and students might participate in “reclaiming problematic expressions thereby revising the work that they do.”
Also engaging in a sustained critique, Erika Knapp centers the pervasive and often ambiguous words inclusion and inclusivity. Knapp’s systematic investigation “revealed tensions between these terms’ emancipatory potential and their role in maintaining existing power relations.” She demonstrates how institutional structures may limit the inclusive potential of approaches, including Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning, by encouraging superficial rather than fundamental changes. Calling on preservice teacher educators to illuminate the operation of power, Knapp asserts: “Creating genuine transformation requires fundamentally restructuring music education’s power relations, centering marginalized voices in defining and implementing inclusive practice, and dismantling rather than merely modifying exclusionary institutional structures.”
In contrast with the pervasiveness of the terms sustainability and inclusion, Eirik Sørbø and Catharina Christophersen explore the rarely utilized word explicit. Explaining the every-growing acceleration and immediacy of late modernity, they offer: “explicit can be a defining word of our time.” Detailing the influence of digital technology and neoliberal principles on contemporary culture, Sørbø and Christophersen link explicitness with the demand for both quickly understood, self-explanatory messages and constant transparency. In music education, explicitness manifests in clear learning objectives, accountability, and the need for immediate applicability of learning. Such explicitness undermines risk, lingering, and anticipation as well as “exploration, ambiguity, and delayed rewards.” Such thinking recalls Silverman’s emphasis on ambiguity as a means of proposing “an unknowable, ‘uncertain’ future, which, in turn, yields an unsettling intimacy” that contrasts explicit, singular trajectories.
By the time you read this piece, the moments that inspired this editorial will have faded; politicians, music teachers, and students will have encountered numerous bifurcating paths, walking down some and permanently bypassing others. Some will choose to love, act curiously, foreground sustainability, and challenge uncritical calls for strength, inclusion, and explicit learning objectives. Others will wander habitually, or perhaps select paths out of hate, spite, and retribution. Still others will favor distraction and disengagement, living with ambivalence about the paths taken and foreclosed. The roads music educators and students take make a difference; considering the words most crucial for determining those journeys resists ambivalence, encouraging purposeful action in each fleeting moment.
References
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. Pantheon Books.
Frost, Robert. 1916. The road not taken. In Mountain Interval. Henry Holt.
O’Rourke, Meghan. 2024, June. On ambivalence: To be, but to be how? Poetry Magazine 224 (3): 249–51, 268.
Temple, James. 2025, June 2. The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/02/1117653/the-trump-administration-has-shut-down-more-than-100-climate-studies/
Wheeler-Bell, Quentin. 2024. DEI as elite class strategy. Catalyst 8 (3): 84–103.