Table of Contents:
Research Questions
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What music education opportunities and models are provided in urban environments similar to Hartford? Specifically, what music opportunities are provided for urban children of color around upper elementary school age?
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How do urban environments impact music education opportunities?
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How do income and transportation impact accessibility to music education?
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To what extent are the children and families of Jubilee House interested in a music program?
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In what ways would a music program benefit the families and children of Jubilee House?
Data Collection
Literature Synthesis
At the start of our research we wanted to find articles that would pertain to our research, whether that be in regards to music education itself or the efforts it takes to keep a community interested and actively participating in such a program. We started this by doing an annotated bibliography, each of us taking a topic that we wanted to learn more about when it comes to building a music education program through articles in journals like Visions of Research in Music Education (2015) and Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education (2016). We also read about case studies that involve people’s personal experiences with music education and the obstacles that they had to face in order to thrive in that kind of environment in Marginalized Voices in Music Education (2017). We wanted to make sure that we had some sort of a basic understanding of music education as a whole before jumping into this project, so we would know what kind of questions would be most beneficial in asking in our research.
City Research
We wanted to compare different cities that have similar demographics to Hartford and try to find the similarities and or differences in what they do for music education. Our main goals in doing this are to see if there is something that Hartford isn’t doing that could be implemented as well as to see what we’re doing differently that could be beneficial to our community. We compared the demographics of these cities as well as their music education opportunities in order to formulate our recommendations for Jubilee House. We selected demographic data based on race/ethnicity, median income, and foreign-born population from the US Census.
Interviews with Experts
We decided that one of the best ways to learn more about music education models and opportunities would be to reach out to local and regional organizations and schools. We wanted to gain a comprehensive understanding of a variety of music pedagogy, how music teachers and community organizers establish and structure music programs, and the experiences of students with different backgrounds and identities. Additionally, we found it important to ask what improvements the community organizations and schools believe could be implemented in the Hartford community, as well as within their own respective school and or organization. This gave us a greater understanding of what could be beneficial when making our own recommendations to Jubilee House.
Surveys at Jubilee House
To find the interest in a music program at Jubilee we decided that the best course of action would be to hand out surveys at their location. Asking a variety of questions about their availability, ability to speak English, overall knowledge about strings, as well as their interest in any type of music program in general. We initially wrote these surveys in English but had group members translate them into both Spanish and French in order to make them more accessible to the community we were surveying. Participants filled out surveys when they were attending classes and events at Jubilee House, and we collected the results every few days throughout the survey period. Surveys were anonymous, but participants had the option to sign up for interviews if they wanted to share more. The surveys give us a more broad understanding of what would be most beneficial to the members at Jubilee house when making our recommendations. Out of approximately 65 students at Jubilee House, we were able to reach 29 people. Of the 29 surveys, 4 were in French and 14 were in Spanish. We transcribed all of our survey data into a spreadsheet in order to be able to analyze the information and share our findings with our community partner.
View PDFs of our surveys below:
Interviews at Jubilee House
From the surveys we were able to see if there was any interest in participating in an interview so we could get more detailed accounts from a few members of Jubilee House. This was to gain a deeper understanding of their want for a music program, and what would make it difficult for them to participate in such a program if Jubilee House was to create one. We coordinated with our community partner to be able to interview their clients at Jubilee House so that we could reach more participants and they could be in a place where they felt comfortable. We conducted seven interviews with a total of nine participants, as two interviews were with couples. Each interview took about five minutes. Each participant was provided a $25 gift card as a thank you for their time. The interviews reviewed some of the survey questions and elaborated on why participants would or would not be interested in the program, what their family’s experience with music is, what they would want in a music program, and what times would be best for them to be able to participate. Our initial aim was to speak with people who are the parents or guardians of children in fourth or fifth grade, but due to scheduling availability we interviewed everyone who was willing and available.
Data Analysis
All of our survey responses were transferred from the paper copies into a spreadsheet. From there, we sorted the data, grouping results in order to avoid single respondents in categories with demographic information.
In order to understand the demographics of our survey population as well as compare their responses, we used Google Sheets and Data Wrapper, which allowed us to filter the data and create visualizations in order to best represent the information we had gathered. Through this data, we were able to gain a general understanding of participants’ interest in a music program at Jubilee House.