Toward convergence: Adapting music education to contemporary society and participatory culture

Knowing how students engage with music outside school music programs can help music educators and their programs evolve. This article offers a look at music teaching and learning in terms of how people are increasingly interacting with music in participatory ways that involve digital technologies and media. This participatory culture offers a means for aligning music education more closely with how people engage with music in contemporary society. The article shows how convergence of older and newer media and such engagement as remixing, creating mash-ups, and interacting with others can provide students with exciting means of connecting to ways of being musical in contemporary society.