| Music uniquely provides for human beings what cannot be provided in any other way. Affording opportunity for undergraduate general education students to express musical identity and experience musical otherness through musical decision making in an e-learning environment propelled the creation of the two courses that became the context for this study. The first course, MUS 339: What's on your playlist? Aesthetic Experiences in Music, invites students to create a negotiated listening curriculum by demonstrating musical understanding through legally edited audio clips from their own library. The second course, MUS 225: Song and Songwriting, invites students to demonstrate musical understanding through originally created songs and fragments. In the context of these courses, I used the phrase thinking-in-music-with-music to describe the act of musical decision-making as demonstrated in the creation and editing of musical clips and songs within these online courses.;My interpretation of the data revealed that students were indeed able to move toward musical understanding through thinking-in-music-with-music in an e-learning environment Data analysis further illuminated some ways that students expressed meaning and value through their experiences in these courses, including a recognition that learning about relationships in music can serve as a vehicle toward enhanced understanding of ourselves and others.;In this study, aesthetic education underwent its own curricular transformation through the wedding of aesthetic agency, learner agency, and the opportunities made possible for musical thinking and decision making demonstrated and shared in the flexible contexts of virtual classrooms. Through this wedding, music was seen in student experience as a transformational agent in otherness, self, agency, and healing. Thinking-in-music-with-music became a transformative technology functioning as an emancipatory dialogic window into student worlds.;Functioning as a teacher/researcher in these settings from 2009-2011, I gathered 386,224 records of virtual data. Using a qualitative methodology, I analyzed these data vfor emergent themes. Layered dialogic analysis invited representation inclusive of arts-based and narrative elements. |
