Learning music in the margins

Funded by Sempre 50th Anniversary Award

Title: Learning music in the margins: Resilience, identity, and educational attainment in Brazilian youth

Recipient: Dr. Graziela Bortz, University of Southern California Thornton School of Music

Date: January 2021

Using a mixed-methods research approach, this study aims to examine the lived experiences, identity work and educational attainment of former students of sociomusical programs in Brazil through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and scales of resilience and internal locus of control. Background literature points to social mobility of youth from underserved communities being facilitated by their engagement on extracurricular programs. Suspecting that participants have a strong internal locus of control and resilience, we intend to examine whether they show higher scores for these two areas in comparison to matched controls, and to juxtapose these findings with interview data.