Music Education’s Hero Collective: More Like the Justice League Than Superman

Clint Randles
University of South Florida

Randles, C. (2017). Music Education’s Hero Collective: More Like the Justice League Than Superman. Journal of Genius and Eminence, 2(2), 88-94. http://dx.doi.org/10.18536/jge.2017.02.2.2.09

This article is the author’s autoethnographic exploration of change in music education (Randles, 2013, 2015a) as illustrative of a hero collective, a term used here to represent a sociocultural explanation of Campbell’s hero’s journey as outlined in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2008). The hero collective is a term that is inclusive of all individuals working in the field of music education who would like to see much more diversity in offerings and modes of musicianship represented in the curriculum of primary and secondary (K-12), as well as higher education music. Tensions involved in this pursuit are presented as part of the separation-initiation-return cycle of Campbell’s hero’s journey as expressed specifically by Vogler (2007). The hero collective is proposed to be a more realistic explanation of how to conceptualize the hero’s journey, given the current discourse in the creativity literature around sociocultural as opposed to purely individualized notions of creativity (Sawyer, 2012). The author makes the case, in line with previous work, that curriculum development is a creative process, and that the hero’s journey might be used as one way of conceptualizing what the change process might look like in the real world.

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