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Recent initiatives by for-profit corporations and funding measures instituted by governments intend to support the preparation of students for careers in computer science and technology. Although such initiatives and measures can indeed increase opportunities for students’ engagement with computer science and technology in K-12 schools, we question whose needs are being served, for what purposes, and at what cost. In particular, we ask whether music educators might be complicit in advancing technology that subordinates human needs—specifically students’ interests in making music in their own creative ways—to modes of production that benefit certain dominant commercial interests in society. After discussing how current computer technology narrows students’ choices, we counter this determinism by highlighting a music subculture that creates and appropriates music technologies for music-related purposes. Our example of the “chipscene” illustrates how music educators might reconceptualize “music making” through modification of existing music technology and thereby restore students’ freedom to “reclaim making” in the age of neoliberalism.

The authors explore the idea of courage in the classroom focusing on two populations of teachers: pre-service undergraduate students and in-service teachers. They articulate their own paths toward their own understandings of facilitating and recognizing acts of courage and share how their educational and pedagogical experiences have led them to think differently about the opportunities of doing and being differently as teachers.

Social contract theory has been used to explain the origin, emergence and justification of governing authorities and as a way of “understanding the political relationships in which people already find themselves, including their obligation to obey the sovereign” (Newey, 2008, p. 133). It has also been used as a “nonliteral image [that is] useful in suggesting directions for social change”(Keeley, 1985, p. 241). Through the lens of social contract theory this article uncovers a series of questions that speak directly to music education in both the U.S. and Brazil. What is the nature of the relationship music educators have to authority? Is there a state of nature from which music education arose and could return? What, if any, guiding morals exist in this state of nature and how have those perpetuated and reproduced policy and advocacy? What kind of contract has been made and should it be kept?

This article considers questions related to educational practices taking in consideration three main concepts: Cultural capital, metodolatry, and salvation. These are taken both in especific terms as well as an metaphorical exercise for the exploration of pedagogical, policy and practice issues and concerns in music education in the United States. The article also makes reference and traces connections between subjects that may create a Pan-American mode of thinking; exorting a call for further, more prolific and greater scope in research and dialogue between North and South regions of the Americas.

This paper explores the ways in which narratives of the "real world" and narratives of resistance collide in teacher preparation programs. The author suggests that in this collision acts of resistance serve to perpetuate and reproduce the very systems these acts seek to interrogate and challenge. How then does this disconnect, between very different ways of seeing and engaging with the educative process, manifest not only for ourselves, but for our students? This paper seeks to address how teachers of teachers grapple with, and even embrace, the contradictions of powerlessness and empowerment that come from the mindful engagement embedded in this path.