Music Therapy Futurist
This has been a strange year for us all. The "way we do things" is changing in all aspects. I started crying a couple of weeks ago when I was watching a movie where people went to a restaurant to eat with people not in their immediate families. I miss just going shopping because it is Saturday, and I want to get out of the house. (I don't do that these days because of the need to remain as germ-free as possible due to my role as a live, in-person, essential health care worker. The responsibility is always there...) My sister has not met her current crop of second graders yet. They are doing virtual learning full-time out where she is. My students are in school full-time, but things look significantly different.
Business is not happening as usual for many of us. As a music therapist, I think that virtual sessions are here to stay in some form moving forward. Now that we have demonstrated that we CAN do this, we will be expected to do this for some of our clients from here on out. Fortunately, there should be some folks out there who will prefer to do telehealth, leaving those who prefer live interaction other clients.
There are many people out there who are writing about the long-term ramifications of this pandemic on all sorts of professions and institutions. The one that I am most fascinated about is the one that avers that higher education will be radically changed by the move to virtual learning. Some folks postulate that university and college programs will have to close because of revenue declines. What will music therapy education look like in five years? How about 20 years?
I find this type of futuristic thinking absolutely fascinating.
When you think about possibilities, there are no wrong answers, there are just outcomes. In my story about the future of music therapy education (search for Persephone in the search function above), I've decided that the pathway to being a music therapist means that you are accepted to one of four graduate programs that are offered worldwide. That's right - four graduate programs in the world for music therapy education. This is just a random decision that I made based in the opinions of some people out there who are also thinking that higher education is getting ready for a significant change in "how things get done." The benefit of having less programs means that there are more music therapy students in each program. My hero's entering class was made up of four THOUSAND students! Could you imagine being around four thousand music therapy students??
I have not managed to progress in my story for some time now. I think some of this block stems from things happening in my own life and some from a bit of pandemic weariness and yet more from not being able to see how things would logically progress into the next step. Maybe I should start from what I think music therapists will be doing with clients in the year 2050 and then work backwards from there.
I think there will be hologram sessions happening - advancing the client/therapist relationship from sessions where you are breathing the same air to interacting in a completely virtual world. I think there will still be live sessions as well, but I can see music therapy becoming much more prevalent in health care if it is offered virtually as well as live. I think we will be a profession that will thrive in the future, IF we are able to change our possibilities into realities.
I see much of this innovation and change coming from the folks out there who are therapists rather than from our university programs. The pandemic has changed how information is conveyed to students, but I am not sure that the content of that information has changed all that much. How therapy is done, though, has had to change (and change rapidly) for music therapy clinicians who are struggling to provide services to clients and gain some sort of revenue. The profession is changing, but I'm not sure that our education is catching up. Now, I am biased towards a competency-based clinical model for education, something that our profession strives for but does not really emulate, for learning how to do this job. I feel that most of the learning how to be a music therapist happens while you are actually engaged in being a music therapist, but I also realize that there is some knowledge that has to be taught in a classroom as well. I just want more opportunities for students to "do" rather than "hear about" music therapy. This train of thought has been the foundation for much of my opinions about education and training in the past. Now that I am designing my own futuristic education program, I get to arrange things the way I want them to be - regardless of curriculum requirements and university faculty senates and professional associations. It's a bit heady, to be sure!
In my future, all future music therapists have to have a bachelor's degree in either music performance, psychology, or music psychology. The entry level for music therapists is a master's degree - one of my biases - and the learning track for each student depends on personal competence in all the areas that I think are important to do this job - again, another bias of mine. Perhaps that is the next step - what competencies do music therapists in the future need to work as therapists??
On that note, I am going to get ready to go to work in the real-time world that we are in right here, right now.
Here are some of the Google results for the future of higher education:
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