Technology and the Gendering of Music Education

Abstract

Critical of technologically determinist assumptions underpinning current educational policy, Victoria Armstrong argues that this growing technicism has grave implications for the music classroom where composition is often synonymous with the music technology suite. The use of computers and associated compositional software in music education is frequently decontextualized from cultural and social relationships, thereby ignoring the fact that new technologies are used and developed within existing social spaces that are always already delineated along gender lines. Armstrong suggests these gender-technology relations have a profound effect on the ways adolescents compose music as well as how gendered identities in the technologized music classroom are constructed.