Tobias, E. S. (2013). Toward convergence: Adapting music education to contemporary society and participatory culture. Music Educators Journal,99(4), 29-36. doi: 10.1177/0027432113483318
After reading the article I found that it was very interesting how the author taught us a new way of incorporating music from today into our curriculum to better engage students. I found that using these sorts of scenarios, which he pointed out in the article, they could be really useful to teach especially in high school where students are more caught up with the new music. I also can relate to this because as a student in high school just last year I find that although the program was interesting, these examples which Tobias explained in the article, would have made some of the projects much more interesting.
As a future teacher myself I always thought of incorporating popular music into my curriculum, and reading this article it has given me a wider variety of ideas that I could potentially use. As well I liked how he encouraged the use of external music apps such as soundcloud and others to upload the projects on there, or to even enter them into a contest. I feel that this kind of project will engage those students who are very passionate about being artists in the future, and this will give them a taste of what that could be like. I feel that by doing this it not only teaches the students to be musical and to learn how to arrange a song, but also it gives them the skill and knowledge of what it is like so that in the future when they are not in school anymore they already have this knowledge of sound mixing, or creating arrangements, etc. For example if one day they manage to get a gig and they need to rearrange for other instruments, they now have this skill and knowledge.
Overall I really enjoyed the article as a whole because it not only gave us the opinion of the author but it also sparked new ideas of what we could do with our classes when teaching new musical concepts with the idea of using contemporary music culture. As well it gave me an idea of another way that I could perhaps teach music to students that is not always done in the traditional way.