Abstract
This chapter focuses on how policies of youth voice and participation are enacted within music projects seeking to develop young people’s emotional literacy and provide platforms for them to be heard. It begins with a discussion of the policy structures relating to participatory arts, strategies of inclusion and social learning in the non-formal education sector, and notions of access to cultural opportunities as adopted by Arts Council England (ACE). Within this policy context, a tension is identified whereby the generally more open, inclusive and universal understandings of cultural production within the aims of youth participation — discussed here as a form of cultural democracy — are challenged by a dominant discourse within arts policy in England, which appears to focus on creating access to, and learning from, predetermined ‘great art’, or what might be seen as the democratisation of (high) culture. This is associated with a further, long-standing tension between an intrinsic view of the benefits of participating in ‘art for art’s sake’ and a more instrumental view of art as providing a ‘vehicle’ for broader development (see Rimmer, 2009 for a detailed discussion of these issues in relation to young people’s musical participation). However, it appears that the overarching discourse that participation in apparently ‘great art’ can somehow be redemptive (i.e. an elitist instrumentalism) is creeping back into policy frameworks at the same time as participatory and culturally democratic aims are being operationalised.
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© 2015 Douglas Lonie and Luke Dickens
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Lonie, D., Dickens, L. (2015). Are You Listening? Voicing What Matters in Non-Formal Music Education Policy and Practice. In: Blazek, M., Kraftl, P. (eds) Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415608_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415608_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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