19 THE MUSIC GOES ROUND AND ROUND: HOW MUSIC MEANS IN SCHOOL Frederick Erickson Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania INTRODUCTION In this essay, I will show how classroom conversation is musical- we sing when we speak zyxwvut - and how this musicality is fundamental for our sense of discourse coherence. Research that shows how talk hangs together so as to make sense may be crucial for implementing what new standards call for as “teaching for understand- ing.” zyxwvuts A researcher’s musical sense may be essential for identifying and analyzing the fundamental organization of classroom talk within which teachers and students construct understanding together. But before making that argument I need to review a range of ways of thinking about music and about possible relations between music (asa form of representation) and educational practice and research. Last year Elliot Eisner, in his AERA presiden- tial address entitled “Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Re- search,” asked us to consider the potential of artistic forms of representation for enhancing forms of understanding in curriculum and in educational research. I agree very much with Eisner’s general thesis. But as a former musician and musicologist,2 I think we need to think carefully about how music fits into Eisner’s overall vision of relations among the arts, educational research, and educational practice. In this re-thinking I believe we need to disabuse ourselves of some popular beliefs about the nature of music that may be misconceptions, and1will address these in the sections that follow. In so doing I do not mean to be dismissive of potential roles of musical ways of knowing in educational research. Nor will I address here possible new roles for music education in the school curriculum (which is an important topic but one that is tangential to the task at hand).Here I want to argue that as we consider possibilities for music in artistic ways of knowing in educational and social research we should not leave unexamined and uncriticized our notions of what music is. The problem with including music in the list of possible artistic sources of new understanding is that music may be different in kind from many of the other arts forms. For centuries, some major theorists of aesthetics and of musical form (aswell as some contemporary psychologists of cognition and perception) have maintained that music as a form of representation is different from the graphic arts and literature, 1. Elliot W. Eisner, “Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research,” zyx Educational zy Researcher 22, no. 7 [1993): 5-11. 2. I was an undergraduate major in composition and music history and I have a master’s degree in music history. EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Winter 1995 / Volume 45 / Number 1 zyx 0 1995 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois