Research Question(s):

1. How can we (as music teachers) show that general music is good for mental health?
2. How can we cater to each students’ personality with regards to music appreciation and
health.

Rationale:
These questions caught my attention and mean a great deal to me. One of the reasons is
that I believe that music can change peoples lives in the best way possible. Mental health is very
important to me and I love music as well so I thought I would talk about how they both relate to
each other. I also believe that there should be more appreciation for music, and the best way to
teach that is by starting early with elementary aged students so they have a basis of how to use
music in their lives later when they are going through their adolescent phase, which is one of the
hardest phases in anyone’s life to go through. “Randles and Smith (2012) found that U.S.
preservice teachers are less confident about their own music creativity, as well as teaching music
creativity, as compared to English counterparts. Odena and Welch (2012) found that in-service
educators with composing and improvising experience were more comfortable with these tasks
in their classrooms. Because of this, music teacher educators have called for music teachers to be
educated in skills that readily employ creative thinking, such as composition.” (Abramo,
Reynolds, 2015). I believe that creative thinking on music educators parts is very important to
education students in general music so they can appreciate it and learn from it, so as they get
older they can use it to their advantage when it comes to mental health and music appreciation. I
plan to research how music can be appreciated and used for mental health through a variety of
ways like: creativity, culture, social justice etc… “I provided a place where students “had voice”
and shared their musical interests with the support of an educator who did not judge those
choices” (Abramo, 2015b). This quote introduces what I also believe is an effective way to help
kids with music appreciation and mental health by giving them their own opinions from the start
because that notion sometimes gets squashed with other areas of life. So, I think I can be an
educator who can give my students as much opportunity to be successful as possible.
 References
Abramo, J. (2015b). Negotiating gender, popular culture, and social justice in music education. In, C.
Benedict, P. Schmidt, G. Spruce, & P. Woodford (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music
Education (pp. 582-597). New York: Oxford University Press.

Abramo, J. M., & Reynolds, A. (2015). "Pedagogical Creativity" as a framework for music teacher
education. Journal of Music Teacher Education, 25(1), 37-51.