Creative Thinking in Music, Twenty-Five Years On

Since the publication of the May 1990 Music Educators Journal Special Focus Issue on Creativity, the profession finds itself in a new and more challenging time. Our field is changing before our eyes as new ideas about the music we teach, the people who are taught, and the way music as art is delivered and consumed affect our pedagogy. In all of this, the dispositions behind the work written in 1990 remain fresh even today. This article revisits the content of the 1990 issue with an eye toward the writings from research and practice that have been done since then and that have extended and refined our understanding of this topic, particularly as it relates to composition in the schools. The conceptual frames of sociocultural approaches, constructivism, and model building are stressed, as are several new dimensions of curriculum that feature teaching practice and the study of product and process with new thinking about assessment and technology. The article asks us to consider changes in teacher education at the college level as well as in our pedagogies for K–12.