Research Synthesis Sunday - Starting Over Again

Here I sit...again...staring at the cursor waiting for some inspiration for what I want to learn about on this day. I have made my list of keywords - music therapy, special education, dual diagnoses, adolescents, early education, upper elementary, etc. The words just go on and on. I can also use the names of diagnoses, but I'm not quite at that point yet. Eventually I will be investigating more around specific diagnoses, but I am not as interested in that aspect of thought at the moment. For now, I am sticking with generalities.

So, I head over to Google Scholar to find an article to think about. My rules are that I need to be able to access the entire article without having to pay for things and that the articles have to be something related to my keyword list. That's it. It also has to catch my interest.

So, I've decided to read through an article by John Pelliteri written in 2000. It's a "Consultant's Corner" article for the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation - another journal that I am not familiar with at this time but that will probably be a good place to investigate for other ideas and research from outside the typical places.

I think one of the dangers of being a music therapist is when we start to think that our journals are the only ones that matter to our profession. There is TONS of information out there being written by music therapists (and those who really don't know what we do) in other journals. We HAVE to remember that we publish only a small journal distributed to a small number of professionals. There is SO much more out there than just what is in the Journal of Music Therapy and Music Therapy Perspectives.

Mr. Pelliteri's article caught my eye because I know a Chris Pelliteri from high school, and I wonder if they are related in anyway. Not really the best reason to choose an article, but an honest one in this case. I have the luxury of not having a specific topic area or purpose for reviewing research and non-research articles. I'm not writing a term paper or thesis, so I can look at whatever I want! As a result, I get to choose articles based on titles or authors or subject matter. It's a wonderful luxury that all folks will get to eventually in their careers!

Based on my rapid skim of this article, I am thinking that I will not be needing lots of time to go through it all. It seems to be a persuasion piece that may be valuable when encouraging non-music therapists to include music therapy in their budgets. We will see next week when I have a chance to dive into the work being presented.

That's it for this week. If you would like to read the article that I found, go to Google Scholar and search Pelliteri, "Music Therapy in the Special Education Setting," the Consultant's Corner. That should get you to the article link. I clicked on the pdf researchgate.net reference out to the right (on my screen). Voila! Pdf format available for FREE!

See you next week for the review of this piece. Happy Sunday, all!

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