Over a decade of promising pedagogical models and technology for music teaching: can the past still reliably guide the future?

Research papers reporting the potential of new technologies and pedagogical models have a tendency to mushroom as educators disseminate the results of promising pilot studies. Some ideas and technologies gain traction and prove sustainable while others are superseded or fall by the way side in search of the next best thing. As a first step towards examining the sustainability of new models and technology for music teaching, this concise paper compares relevant themes in a selection of current publications with those in past publications around the turn of the millennium. In so doing, this paper also considers the ASCILITE 2012 “premise that what happened in the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future.”