Exit Interview

1. What is your essential question, what are your answers? What is your best answer and why?
-My essential question is 'What is the most effective way to positively impact a community through music education?'. My three answers are: to make the education of music easily accessible, to implement music technology, and to provide academic support.
My best answer is my first answer because it is a gateway step to all other things that must fall into place in order for music education to be effective(positively) in a community. I can have any of my other answers individually or put together but they're still not as strong (of answers) as my first one.

2. What process did you take to get to this answer?
-To get to my first answer, I had to find a way to combine the results of research I'd found. My background research consisted on what was wrong with music education today, then it slowly progresses to How To Fix It and Positive Impacts of Music/Music Education. I found that all problems and resolutions were somehow all connected, like a domino effect. I researched what in history had led to a decline in music education, and every decline in music education is the same; Loss in government money means taking money from schools and programs. After all this, I came to the conclusion that throughout history and even today, the decline in music education is a result of no money and less and less access to programs.

3. What problems did you face? How did you overcome them?
-A large problem I faced was miss informative or biased articles. Another problem I faced was getting a good mentorship to help answer my EQ. Often times the conductors (music teachers) were too busy and the classes were either really large or too small. I overcame this by not citing bad sources, but considering what they had to say with respect. As for my mentorship, I decided to use the class sizes to my advantage. The smaller class was a college class, the larger one a high school class. So I researched the money put into high school music vs higher education, and observed the pro's & con's of class size.

4. What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
-My two most significant sources to help answer my essential question have been both of my mentorships, and most music history articles I've found. The history articles I found were more informative for music education because history tends to repeat itself. My mentorship also helped because I could apply principals from history and observe the community of LA in different aspects.