Canadian Content in Music Curriculum: Policy and Practice

Shand and Bartel present a follow-up to their 1995 article “ Canadian Music in the School Curriculum: Illusion or Reality?” (in Taking a Stand: Essays in Honour of John Beckwith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. pp. 125-145). In this 1998 article, the authors ask “What priority is given to Canadian music in the published music curriculum documents for Canadian schools?” They seek to discover if John Adaskin’ s stated aim of 25% Canadian content in music education has been achieved. The authors examined two groups of curriculum documents: 55 from provincial ministries of education, published since 1980; 45 published by 15 Ontario school boards, representing a variety of geographic areas, educational levels, and type of instruction. These documents were analyzed to answer four research questions focused on (1) proportion of Canadian material recommended; (2) differences in priority in regards to language (English, French, Aboriginal); (3) differences in priority relating to traditional folk music and composed music; (4) proportion of curriculum documents which present a specific policy statement about Canadian music, and any effect this seems to have on references given in the document. All recommended Canadian material in each curriculum document was itemized and classified in a variety of categories (e.g., individual pieces of music were classified as folk or composed, as long or short, by language, etc.). The results are given in a variety of statistical tables. Analysis by province showed Ontario to have the highest Canadian content in its documents, over a variety of categories. In answer to their research questions, Shand and Bartel found that: (1) of the individual pieces recommended in the 55 provincial ministry of education curricula, 12.3 percent were Canadian; (2) outside of Quebec, the language of recommended Canadian music was overwhelmingly English, with Aboriginal languages in only seven of 555 pieces; (3) folk music made up 40.7% of the Canadian repertoire recommended, and this was largely skewed towards the Kindergarten-Grade 6 bracket; (4) policy statements appeared in 36% of provincial documents and in 12% of local Ontario board documents, and those administrative units with such a statement had more references to Canadian material than those without. Multicultural policy statements did not seem correlated with any increase in recommended folk material. Shand and Bartel note the lack of Aboriginal material recommended in the curriculum documents studied, as well as the limited language range of recommended materials and the marginalization of multicultural communities implied in this. The authors announce an interest in exploring ways that policy statements and published curriculum documents influence actual classroom practice, and they state a strong goal for the educational community: to have every ministry and board of education require students to perform and study Canadian music as an important step in developing the students’ Canadian identities