Equity and Access in Out-of-School Music Making
This chapter focuses on the importance of community to both music education and the ways that youth shape their ideas, interests, and identities in music. Musical learning is rarely, if ever, about a learner operating a new musical technology-based tool in isolation. Music is inherently social and these influences have a great impact upon the development of musical identities. This chapter explores the ways that out-of-school spaces like those in the Computer Clubhouse Network, YOUmedia, and Musical Futures support social music learning by providing private recording studios that allow youth to assume increasingly public roles as musicians, performers, and producers; and describe how mixing formal, non-formal, and informal learning spaces helps to develop a youth’s musical maturity through what is known as the “progression pathways model.”