Music Education Webinar: Dr. Nasim Niknafs

The Adelphi University Music Education Webinar Series offers music educators exciting opportunities to engage with renowned experts in the field while exploring current topics in music education. All sessions will consist of informative presentations and moderated Q&A sessions.

Popular music education has deservedly gained momentum in the field and is now an official strand of inquiry, practice and theoretical analyses. Many scholars and music educators have paid apposite attention to this mode of music making and learning and begun to integrate it more in their curricula and pedagogies. Nevertheless, there is not much said about its global aspects in the field, namely, popular music’s roles and meanings in different cultural and subcultural practices, and the ways in which they are learned, exchanged, and developed. In this talk, I will first elaborate on my longitudinal research with rock and fusion musicians in Iran and provide examples of different modes of engagement with popular music such as activism and anarchism. I will, then, open up the conversation to other possibilities for music educators to integrate popular music in their teaching and curriculum from many kinds of localities and cultural practices even if unfamiliar to them. I will conclude by arguing against familiar deficit models such as fear of the unknown, lack of skill sets necessary, or logistic limitations which can interfere with joys of learning in and through popular music.

Born and raised in Iran, Nasim Niknafs is an Associate Professor of Music Education at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. The recipient of the Connaught New Researcher Award, Faculty Mobility Grant, and OMEA’s Agha Khan Initiative, Nasim’s research areas include social justice, activism, and politics of contemporary music education, cultural politics, and popular music. Concluding a longitudinal research on the music education of rock musicians in Iran, Nasim has recently begun another longitudinal research on the music education and cultural programs provided for the refugee newcomer populations in Canada. Nasim’s research has been widely published in venues such as the Philosophy of Music Education Review; International Journal of Music Education; Music Education Research; Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education; Music Educators Journal; Punk Pedagogies; Difference and Division in Music Education; The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Perspectives on Assessment in Music Education; and General Music Today. At the university level, Nasim has taught courses and seminars such as “Politics of Sound and Music Making,” “Multimodal Approaches to Music Teaching and Learning,” “Music and Contemporary Politics,” “Cultural Perspectives in Music Education,” “Advanced Topics in Research in Music Education,” and “(Un)Popular Music Education.” In addition to her research and teaching, Nasim is active in her field by serving in multiple editorial and steering committees; co-chairing the 7^th International Conference on Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (NIME7); and guest editing Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education’s special issue on Anti-Racism, Anti-Fascism, and Anti-Discrimination in and through Music Education. Nasim holds degrees from Northwestern University, New York University, Kingston University, London, and University of Art, Tehran.

Register for the entire series of workshops by clicking here.

Additional Webinars in this series:
Eric Whitacre – Saturday, March 20 – 1:00 p.m. EST
Dr. Latasha Thomas-Durrell – Saturday, April 10 – 11:00 a.m. EST
Dr. Lazslo Norbert Nemes – Saturday, April 24 – 11:00 a.m. EST
Franklin Willis – Saturday, May 1 – 11:00 a.m. EST