Directions to the school music education for a new era

Abstract

This chapter is a compendium of the various issues discussed along Section III, on Curriculum Development, of the SAGE Handbook of School Music Education. It is dedicated to establishing the foundations of a new school music curriculum for these contemporary times, identifying four major features: (1) an integral and transversal education, in which the sciences and the humanities are on an equal footing; (2) what cultural heritage should be passed on to new generations, in which all musical genres are also on an equal footing, and which starts from students' preferences, so that an intercultural and cosmopolitan curriculum is necessary; (3) the need to contextualize learning, which recognizes that teaching should be a consequence of the students' environment, and that evaluation and assessment must be based on the students' experiences; and (4) a digitalization of the teaching and learning process, which leads to a situated learning of students in which they thrive as subjects. In fact, there is a fifth feature that is a sine qua non for curriculum development: a policy framework that allows it and that is accepted by teachers and students, an issue discussed in the final section, among others. The main conclusion is that we need to move from a content-based curriculum to a student-based curriculum.