Past Symposia
Desert Skies Symposium on Research in Music Learning and Teaching
School of Music, Dance & Theatre | Arizona State University
February 16-18, 2023
The School of Music, Dance and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University welcomes the 2023 Desert Skies Symposium for Research in Music Education to Tempe and the ASU campus on February 16-18. See the links below for further information.
Registration
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Lois Brown
As director of the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, Brown oversees the only entity at ASU and in the state of Arizona that positions race and democracy in direct relation with each other. Some of Professor Brown’s work include several published books such as "Black Daughter of the Revolution: A Literary Biography of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins," "Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar" and "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance." Professor Brown’s current projects include biographies of influential but understudied African American women of the nineteenth century, African Americans in 18th and 19th century Concord, Massachusetts and a collection of essays on race, place and history in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Arizona.
Professor Brown was featured on the acclaimed PBS documentary The Abolitionists and has curated and collaborated on exhibitions for the Museum of African American History in Boston and the Boston Public Library. Professor Brown is an award-winning teacher whose courses include Race, Place and Power in African American Women's Writing, the African American Short Story, Writing on the Land of Freedom: The Pastoral in African American Literature, Slavery and the Literary Imagination and Reel Black: African American Life in Film.
Dr. Warren H. Stewart, Sr.
Dr. Warren H. Stewart Sr. has been Senior Pastor of the First Institutional Baptist Church of Phoenix, Arizona since 1977. His ministry is characterized by an unwavering commitment and Spirit-filled zeal to engage in evangelism and emancipation, meeting the needs of the whole person. He is also recognized by others as “a man of conscience, commitment and dedication to the cause of moral leadership, human rights and a soldier of justice and equality.” Dr. Stewart has been cited as one of the most influential religious leaders in Arizona and the nation, and his ministry extends internationally.
Dr. Stewart organized and led two broad-based coalitions—ARIZONANS FOR A MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. STATE HOLIDAY and VICTORY TOGETHER, Inc.--an organization that campaigned for a Martin Luther King, Jr./Civil Rights Day in Arizona which was won by a historic vote of the people in the general election on November 3, 1992, after a decades-long fight. In 2015, he was inducted into the 30th Anniversary of the Martin Luther King, Jr. College of Clergy & Laity—Board of Preachers in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Stewart is a husband, father, grandfather and mentor who has also earned five degrees, including the Doctor of Ministry degree from American Baptist Seminary of the West in Berkeley, CA. He is the author of five books, including his first book, Interpreting God’s Word in Black Preaching (in its fifth printing). His latest publication was VICTORY TOGETHER FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: The Story of Dr. Warren H. Stewart, Sr., Governor Evan Mecham and the Historic Battle for a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in Arizona.
Link to full bio https://www.fibcaz.org/drwarrenhstewartsr
Conference Schedule and Locations
Symposium Program
Please visit the following link to view the program.
2023 Desert Skies Symposium Program
This program is subject to change up until and through the conference. Please check this link regularly for the most up-to-date information.
Abstracts
Travel
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, is the main airport serving the Greater Phoenix area. It serves more than 40 million passengers a year, and goes to more than 100 domestic and international destinations, making it one of the 10 busiest airports in the U.S. With about 1,200 daily flights – about 500 nonstop – Sky Harbor is one of the most convenient airports and is about six miles from the campus and the conference hotel.
The conference hotel (The Graduate Tempe) has a free shuttle between the hotel and airport (on the hour). Directions from Sky Harbor Airport.
Getting Around Tempe
The Graduate Tempe is located approximately 0.6 miles away from Old Main, the campus building in which all of the conference events will take place. You may use the following link to find directions across campus - Travel Between Old Main and the Graduate Tempe.
If there are conference attendees who need assistance travelling from the hotel to the conference space, transportation is available at the start and end of the conference day -- please write to Matthew Fiorentino if you need a ride.
For those who need to park on campus, please use this form (this link has been updated for access to those outside ASU): https://forms.gle/9EbwLvZNibn33Rkf9
Book your group rate at the Graduate Tempe
Rooms are available at a nightly rate of $175.00 on February 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th. The cut-off date for receiving this special conference rate is Wednesday, January 18, 2023. To reserve a room, please visit graduatehotels.com/tempe and ask for the ASU Desert Skies Conference rate. Each guest is responsible for paying their own room, taxes, incidentals, and damages.
Instructions for Presenters
The Desert Skies Symposium has used the following presentation format for several years, and we will continue with this format for the 2023 event.
Sessions are 90 minutes long. Each 90-minute session will begin with eight to nine one-minute lightening talks given by each of that session’s presenters. The lightening talks are session overviews to help attendees select three presentations to attend. Attendees will then go to one of the presentation tables/spaces, where authors will present seated at a table to six to ten attendees.
Typically, presenters do not read entire papers. We ask that you prepare a presentation of your research in a format that fosters engaging discussion and questions from those who have selected your session. Some presenters choose to use slides and/or audio/video clips using their personal laptop computers. We will have some laptops/ipads available for presenters to use if needed. Some past presenters chose to provide handouts or an outline. Neither is required. Additional ideas are welcome!
After about 25 minutes, groups rotate, and presenters repeat to a new small group, then another rotation occurs. In other words, you will present/discuss your research three times, each time with a different small group of attendees, during the same 90-minute session.
Call for Papers
The Desert Skies Symposium on Research in Music Learning and Teaching invites submissions for the seventeenth biennial meeting, to be held February 16-18, 2023, on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.
You are invited to submit papers related to research on music learning and teaching in any context. The Desert Skies Symposium conceives of research broadly and encourages the submission of a variety of methodologies and styles of inquiry.
We encourage applications from college and university faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, preK12 music educators, teaching artists, music therapists and music therapy researchers, and community music educators. Finally, we explicitly encourage work that centers equity and justice as well as interdisciplinary study and community-based or community-inspired work.
Submit your abstract of 700-800 words (references not included in word count) by the extended deadline of September 26, 2022 as an attachment at https://airtable.com/shr31wuu2Uu4YKt5c. Include the author or first author’s last name in the filename (e.g., Smith.DesertSkies.2023).
Download a copy of the 2023 CFP here: 2023 Desert Skies Call for Papers
The 2021 Desert Skies Symposium on Research in Music Learning and Teaching is open to all music and arts educators, artists, and community members, and focuses on persistent questions in education, the arts, and culture. The conference schedule and sessions are designed to be interactive, with opportunities to be in dialogue with one another about urgent matters in our field, particularly matters of justice, inclusion, and diversity. For the 2021 Symposium, the plenary speakers will be Bryan Brayboy, Natalie Diaz, and Django Paris. Each speaker will be featured in a plenary session, including a dialogue time with participants, and then all three speakers will be together in a conversation session with each other and conference participants. We’ve asked these three distinguished guests to help us think about indigeneity, justice, and how our work can support transformative change in this moment.
Plenary Speakers:
Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee) is President’s Professor of Indigenous education and justice in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. At ASU, he is senior advisor to the president, director of the Center for Indian Education, associate director of the School of Social Transformation, and co-editor of the Journal of American Indian Education. He is the author of more than 90 scholarly documents, including being the author/editor of eight volumes, dozens of articles and book chapters, multiple policy briefs for the U.S. Department of Education, National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the role of race and diversity in higher education, and the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of higher education. He and his team have, over the past 17 years, prepared more than 155 Native teachers to work in American Indian communities and more than 15 American Indian PhDs.
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumni of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
Django Paris is a Black educator and scholar born on Ohlone homelands in San Francisco, California to a White mother and a Black Jamaican father. Paris is honored to be the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington. His teaching and research focus on sustaining languages, literacies, and lifeways among Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander students in the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, and justice movements in and beyond schools. He is particularly concerned with educational and cultural justice as outcomes of inquiry and pedagogy. Paris is author of Language across Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools (2011), and co-editor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (2014), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (2017) and Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square.
Schedule and Desert Skies Final Program
This schedule is a complete guide to participating in the 2021 Desert Skies Symposium. Each session and paper session room has been assigned its own Zoom link. You can find those links by clicking on each of the session and paper room titles (i.e., “Plenary Session 1,” “Room Three”).
Additionally, you can find abstracts for each paper session at the top of each session, and you can see lightning talk introductions to the papers by clicking on most of the paper titles.
We look forward to starting the symposium with the Welcome and Orientation on Thursday, February 18th at 9:00 am MST. During the first session of each day, you can enjoy last-minute announcements as well as answers to questions that have been addressed in previous emails over your morning beverage of choice!
One of the most enjoyable part of conference attendance is the sometimes-spontaneous/sometimes-long awaited conversations we take up with colleagues and new acquaintances. On both Thursday and Friday, we’ll end the day with a session of “Conversation and Reflection.” We invite you to gather to talk about the day, about questions, about problems, about ideas, and about actions. We’ve designed Desert Skies 2021 to focus on matters of equity and justice, with three plenary speakers who will have much to offer us alongside your thought-provoking papers.
We’ll have several breakout rooms that you can enter on your own. So, invite a graduate student, senior scholar, close friend, or new collaborator to coffee, dinner, or a drink throughout the day with plans to meet during the Conversation and Reflection session.
If you’d like to host a conversation on a specific topic, let us know and we’ll set up a room for you. You can tell us about the breakout discussions you’d like to have in advance by emailing your ideas to desertskies2021@asu.edu. We hope to generate ideas that can lead to action and transformative change for all of us.
The conference ends with two sessions for everyone. The first is labeled “Reflection and Calls to Action.” We hope that the conference generates ideas for how each of us individually and all of us collectively might continue to work toward justice and equity in our lives and our profession. Please join us during this time to reflect, think, and act. Finally, the very last session is an “End of Conference Zoom Room Celebration.” We will be very glad to hear your ideas about conference during that time, and, we don’t know about you, but happy hour will have arrived in Arizona by then.
Conference Schedule Outline and Locations for February 23-25
February 23: 11 am to 6 pm. The Graduate Hotel, 2nd floor conference room
February 24: 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. ASU Memorial Union, Cochise room
February 25: 8:30 am to 1:00 pm. ASU Memorial Union, Alumni Lounge
Conference Program
Conference Abstracts
desert_skies_2017_session_1.pdf
desert_skies_2017_session_2.pdf
desert_skies_2017_session_3.pdf
desert_skies_2017_session_4.pdf
desert_skies_2017_session_5.pdf
desert_skies_2017_session_6.pdf
desert_skies_2017_session_7.pdf
Symposium on Research in Music Education
February 19-21, 2015
Tucson, Arizona
The Symposium
The Desert Skies Symposium on Research in Music Education is the longest-running symposium on music education in the United States and draws prominent national and international researchers and pedagogues. The Symposium provides a forum for researchers to share the results of their investigations with K-16 teachers. This biennial event, (held in February of odd-numbered years) is attended by K-12 teachers and graduate students, as well as national and international professors, and independent scholars.
Schedule Outline
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Registration 5:30
Opening Speaker: 6:00
Research Session 1: 7:15-8:45
Reception: 8:45-9:45 (Light refreshments served)
Friday, February 20, 2015
Keynote Speaker: 9:00 - 9:45
Discussion/Questions 9:45 – 10:15
Research Session 2: 10:30 - 12:00
Lunch: 12:00 - 2:00
Research Sessions 3 and 4: 2:00 - 5:15
Evening is on your own
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Keynote Speaker: 8:30 - 9:15
Discussion/Questions 9:15 – 9:45
Research Sessions 5 and 6: 9:45 – 12:45
Conference ends: 12:45
2015_overview_-_desert_skies_session_format.pdf
2015_symposium_-program_final_v2.pdf
desert_skies_advisory_board_meeting_minutes.pdf
a_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_front_matter.pdf
b_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_raiber_pp_5-23.pdf
c_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_campbell_thompson_pp_24-38.pdf
d_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_conkling_pp_39-50.pdf
e_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_brinkman_pp_51-60.pdf
f_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_lowe_pp_61-76.pdf
g_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_kelly_pp_77-86.pdf
h_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_madura_pp_87-98.pdf
i_-_2001_desert_skies_proceedings_-_rutkowski_miller_campbell_pp_99-111.pdf