By Rachael Sanguinetti, APME Graduate Conference Committee Member
APME is excited to be hosting the 2nd annual Graduate Conference this weekend. This year, we have presenters from five different countries bringing together their ideas about popular music, diversity, and the future of music education to attendees from across the globe.
The theme of the conference, “The Future We Create”, embodies the entire purpose of this conference. The creation of this conference came from my own reflections after attending my first APME annual conference in 2021. I came home from Chicago exhilarated, energized, and exhausted. As a graduate student at a school without a popular music focus, it was exciting for me to be surrounded for three days by people who shared my passion for teaching, research, and forward thinking. I had never attended a conference quite like it, and I wanted more.
As someone who hopes to teach in higher education after completing my degree, I am always thinking about building my network, especially my network of individuals who share similar research interests. I had met two graduate students at my first APME conference, but I knew there had to be more in the organization. I also recognize that attending conferences can be very costly, and many graduate students are not able to shell out the price of travel to the conference every year. I asked myself the following: how can we create an opportunity for all of us to gather, share our ideas, and develop a graduate student community for little or no cost? How could we all engage further with this organization while providing opportunities for presentations, conversations, and professional growth?
Enter the graduate conference. For those not familiar with the conference, it is held entirely on Zoom, eliminating the need for travel expenses. The conference is also free to attend, virtually eliminating all potential costs for graduate student participants. Similar to the annual APME conference, we put out a call for presentations and papers, and graduate students are invited to submit their work. As a planning committee, we accept as many presentations as possible, sometimes working with a potential presenter to improve, shape, and grow their presentation idea to make it a fit for this conference. All ideas related to popular music and education are welcome and, as attendees will see in our conference this year, our graduate students’ research interests are quite varied.
Back to the theme of “The Future We Create”. Throughout this conference experience, I try to stop and reflect on the fact that these amazing and brilliant individuals presenting at this conference are the future of popular music education and this organization. We are the next generation of educators, advocates, scholars, and music makers. We have the power to continue to push music making and music education in the direction we believe honors, celebrates, and includes all learners. The future of popular music education is truly what we create, and, based on the presentations we will be sharing this weekend, our profession is in very capable hands.
The APME Graduate Conference will be held over Zoom on Friday January 20th and Saturday January 21st. Registration is free and can be found here: https://www.popularmusiceducation.org/conferences/2023-graduate-virtual-conference-the-future-we-create/
Rachael Sanguinetti is a member of the APME Conference Planning Committee and a PhD student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. A vocalist by training, she also enjoys playing piano, ukulele, and guitar. Her research interests include many popular music education topics, culturally responsive educational practices, and secondary general music curriculum. Before beginning graduate students, Rachael taught K-12 general music and chorus for seven years in upstate New York.