Summary of Ongoing Project [Readings in Musicology - 2021]

This was a brief summary on an ongoing project with an American colleague around the 'Academization' and integration of YouTube into contemporary, pedagogical methodologies for Music Education and Musicology praxis. [More details are available upon request].

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In collaboration with my colleague at Temple University, in Philadelphia, we are studying and conceiving of a theoretical framework to recolor the role of YouTube in Academic pedagogy, specifically for Music Education, Music Educators, and students, with an expressed focus on arguing for the ‘Academic’ usefulness of YouTube. Begun in January of 2020, we thought separately about the possibilities of what YouTube could offer for students in their pursuit of self-directed learning.

Our overall point was justifying the evaluative concept of “YouTube as an Academic Source,” namely what would take for us to take YouTube seriously as a contemporary mode of knowledge accrual for students and Academics? However, the ‘Academization’ of YouTube presents novel challenges, primarily around bias, faulty, and inaccurate information being disseminated to viewers [especially students] with little direct oversight, and its uncontrollable influence on knowledge building. For me, I first decided to look at the comment section and how the idea of community helped students evaluate content’s efficacy for their individual learning paths, while my colleague was looking at the ‘Professors of YouTubeinversity,’ with the expressed goal to delineate how students were utilizing digital Professor-substitutes to supplement their in-class content. We saw, in our individual practices and usages of YouTube both professionally and vernacularly [and then quantitatively later on], the popularity of this freely accessible platform for interdisciplinary learning development, not curtailed by classroom localities.

then sparked our ongoing work into creating a theoretical methodology around YouTube’s “Academization” as currently there is no coherent process available for evaluating the efficacy of YouTube content for Music Educational purposes, as well as a theoretical open-access database which can be filled with embedded YouTube videos with commentary and parameters added by Educators which can serve as a catalogue of Music-Education videos which can bolster and simplify in-class/super-class usage of YouTube.

We began by surveying the YouTube landscape through identifying and interviewing YouTubers that exemplified the best of several strains of Music-based content on YouTube [Music Education, Historical/Popular/Theory-based Musicology]. Aftering having conducted eight interviews, we set-about distilling our findings, namely identifying the commonalities between the interviewee’s statements and relationship to several tenants like overall aesthetic, Educational implications, thoughts on their position in Academia, and intended [unintended] audience demographics. We then presented our digital-ethnographic findings at a 2021 Conference. Following this step, we realized we needed to collect feedback from current Music Educators and developing Music Educators on their experiences and interests their utilization of YouTube in order to create a database that caters to the actual needs of current and prospective Music Educators. To do this, we presented a workshop presentation at a recent 2021 conference catering to current Ph.D candidates.

Having spurned a dialectic around five different themes of YouTube’s “Academic” prospects for Music Educators [Perceived demographics, Creator Identity, Feedback and Critique, Production Value, Inaccuracies], we were able to collect pertinent information that will help us devise a plan for future work in creating the database and methodological process in video evaluation. At present, the project is undergoing, and we are now tasked with processing our second Conference’s feedback in order to devise a plan for future, digital work.

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