Considering Leisure in Education with Roger Mantie

In this interview with Roger Mantie, we discuss the importance of leisure for self preservation, problematize the single focus of education for workforce readiness, discuss the importance of focusing on happiness and wellbeing, explore discourse in education and around leisure, and much more.

Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
each week alternates between an
interview with a guest and a solo
episode where i unpack some scholarship
this week's episode is an interview with
roger mantai who was one of my co-chairs
for my dissertation
over the years of working with roger he
has challenged my own understanding of
education by
encouraging me to think about the
importance of leisure in relation to
education in this particular episode we
discussed the importance of leisure for
self-preservation
challenging the single focus of
education for workforce readiness
the importance of focusing on happiness
and well-being considering discourse in
education and around leisure
and much more when listening to this
particular episode
i encourage everyone to think of how
might computer science
education relate to leisure rather than
just workforce readiness
one of the reasons why i reached out to
roger to do this particular interview
and it's one of the reasons why i did an
episode on modding for leisure
which i'll include a link to that in the
show notes which you can find at jared
o'leary.com or by simply clicking
the link in the app that you're
listening to this on alright so we will
now begin this interview
with an introduction by roger i'm
currently an associate professor
in the music and culture program which
is situated within the department of
arts culture and media
and this is all at the university of
toronto's scarborough campus it has a
couple of
campuses but i also have a graduate
appointment that is downtown
that's in the department of curriculum
teaching and learning which is
at the ontario institute of studies and
education which is
part of the university of toronto but
it's essentially the faculty of
education
i've been back in toronto for this is my
third year i guess
prior to that i was at arizona state
university and prior to that i was at
boston university
and prior to that i was a school music
teacher in manitoba
so most of my career has been in the
field of education certainly in the
field of
music education primarily prior to now
where
i'm a little bit more in the department
of arts culture and media it's music
a little bit more broadly focused so can
you tell me a story about an experience
in education that continues to impact
you so i've been
i guess in education formally for i hate
to say it it's about
when you talk about like one
story that can be a little bit tricky
because there are just so many stories
over a 30-year career
i suppose one of my favorite stories
when i was
teaching school you know i was a band
director and one year well i did this
number of years but one year
top jazz ensemble we spent a lot of time
creating our own
set this entire thing was student
created you know i was really
believer in that and i thought okay this
is great so we went into a festival
and in the u.s festivals are sometimes
called contests you know
usually a competitive affair this
particular festival
was also a little bit competitive and we
went in and we went to play and before
we started you know the adjudicators and
remember this was a jazz festival the
adjudicators sort of stopped me i was
about to introduce and then they were
like
but we need the score and i said there
wasn't a score and there wasn't just one
there were there were like these three
jazz adjudicators and they were like
well but we can't really adjudicate you
without a score
when you think about the irony of this
being jazz you know the idea
that an art form you know at least in
the mythology you know predicated on an
improvisation in creativity
you would not be able to evaluate a
group unless you had a score
the implication being that we can't tell
how well you're doing
unless we can compare it to this notated
version of what you're supposed to be
doing so the point of the story being
that it exposed
the underlying sort of value structure
that says that
the only way we can understand what
you're doing
is by comparing it to your attempt
to match up with this other thing and
of course we can only evaluate then in
terms of your rightness or wrongness the
extent to which you successfully
executed
what i'm seeing in this written version
this embodied form
of sound as it exists in a kind of
visual representation way and so it was
at that point when i i started to really
step back
and rethink you know i've been in this
i've been teaching for quite a long time
by this point you know i was probably 10
and but at that point i was like okay
there's something seriously messed up
with the structures of our field in
terms of
what we think we're about because we
think that this is about the joy of
music making and the love of music and
whatnot
but really it's putting students through
a particular exercise
that is meant to simply cram something
into them or at them and then force them
to regurgitate it back and i started to
see how
all of the education system was about a
normative comparison and ranking
exercise
you know that this particular music
festival embodied but you can see this
in any i mean standardized tests you
know high stakes standardized testing is
pretty indicative of that
it's basically how everything in
education cannot be
understood unless it is filtered through
a kind of codification and
standardization
and i just came to realize at that point
that that was really at odds with my own
value system
of how i understood learning and
teaching and schooling and education
and i suppose that that was probably the
beginning of the end
of my public school career in so far as
it got me thinking you know what i need
to learn more and so that's
i think that was very close to around
the time when i made the commitment to
pursue
phd and higher education and is that how
you
started looking into researching leisure
or is there a different story that kind
of impacted that interest
so we were living in manitoba at the
time and my wife and i we quit our jobs
we sold the house sold all our
possessions and we moved to toronto so i
could start the phd
and it seemed like a good idea at the
time it seems a little crazy to think
about it now but
when we did that we didn't really have
much in the way of income and why not so
a couple of the
little gigs that i took on i mean they
were very small and so
one of the things i did was i took on
the position of the director of the
royal conservatory music community
school jazz ensemble so the community
school not being the sort of
professional training stuff for young
people that the royal conservatory of
music is known for but rather they're
kind of community school outreach
stuff and this jazz ensemble was
fascinating because they were just like
people in the community who
loved playing jazz in the big band
setting and they wanted to keep on
playing and they didn't know
where else to go so they would pay a
little bit and participate and
they turned out to be a really
interesting eclectic
mix of people from all sorts of
different backgrounds and walks of life
it was a reminder after teaching music
in school where
you know music at the high school level
is often elective which means that
students are choosing to be there but
sometimes they're choosing to be there
under the auspices of of
what high school is and getting credits
and whatnot and sometimes certainly
because of their parents saying music is
good for you you need to do this
but then you get out and you have adults
who have no reason to be there other
than they just want to make music
because they just like making music and
that was one of the two gigs and the
other gig was i
got the gig as the director of the heart
house symphonic band so at the
university of toronto hart house is the
student center
if you've seen the harry potter movies
hart house looks very much like hogwarts
and the great hall
in hart house where we rehearsed was the
exact copy of the oxford one where the
first harry potter
great hall of hogwarts was so that gives
you the visualization of it and that's
where we would rehearse each week
the ensemble was made up of non-music
majors the faculty music has all their
own ensembles this was for anybody on
campus who just wanted to keep playing
in combination with that the jazz
ensemble the royal conservatory
community school you know twice a week i
was surrounded by all these people
who were not there as part of their
pre-professional training in the case of
you know undergraduate students
or as part of their occupational
interests in the case of the community
school jazz ensemble so
you know and they were just from all
sorts of different disciplines
and the passion that they brought was
what really i think i'd been thinking
about
lifelong aspects of music making for a
long time even when i was teaching at
school but then when i saw
how dedicated these students were and
one
particular story you know one of the
pieces i did with the group one year was
uh godzilla eats las vegas you know a
famous kind of campy piece
very programmatic it's fun in there they
have a
part for a theremin and you know so the
percussionist comes up to me after
rehearsal and he's like what is this
this thing and it kind of explained to
him it was like well you know the beach
boys good vibrations you know star trek
you know
this sound and he understood so of
course the next week he comes back
and he's got one and i'm like where on
earth did you find a theremin and he was
like oh i just built it
and you know again this was this was
kind of like in the i don't know 2007
and so you know yes you could kind of
just
look up do-it-yourself stuff but it's
not like today with youtube where you
can find everything so this
he was an engineering student he was
like yeah no i just i mean i asked my
professor and i was like oh that's
that's easy i can't just do that so he
just built a theremin and just brought
it in the next week just
because that's what you do and so i
think that
those kinds of experiences really
reinforced for me
the basic idea that it's not like you
have to choose
if you're thinking about music students
as
people who take degrees in music you
know this is a vocational path it's a
professional path
you're doing a particular thing and the
point is that you're
going to be a musician or do something
in a primarily music related field
whereas none of the people that i was
interacting with on a regular basis in
either of those
two settings music was their love and
their passion and
they didn't feel like a failed musician
they felt like yes i'm gonna be an
engineer but i just like making music
you know and so
it was really uh formative in
solidifying i guess for me
various strands of thought that i've
been having about how
the place that music might fill in both
individual lives and society lives
collective lives social lives and
whatnot
and how is their dedication different
because like to be a music student like
both of us having
been there and done that like it
requires an immense amount of time
in order to go through a ton of
dedication if you are going to sign up
as a music major but how was it
different for the people who were doing
it in their leisure
one of the things that i think is
interesting at least for me is the
purpose
or the way in which people are
conceptualizing
their activity and those early days i've
done a lot of research in this area
and there's no one-size-fits-all you
know in terms of people's responses so
i've spent a lot of time
interviewing and talking to people and
and surveying people in various
sort of areas so for example not to plug
my recent book but you know
the book that i just came out with brent
talbott and i wrote education music
and the lives of undergraduates and then
the subtitle which is the real title
which is collegiate acapella and the
pursuit of happiness
and for so many of those students you
know when i would ask them
because they're non-music majors as well
and i would ask them
you know why do you do this etc etc
because it's very time consuming to
speak to your point about the dedication
and of course they had a lot of
different responses but
for so many of them it was what they
thought was the critical thing
for personal wellness like they really
conceptualized this
in terms of an overall not just
self-preservation although i'll speak to
that in a second
but it was an overall very deliberate
understanding that they needed to do
something
for self-care and something that they
loved doing so they really liked doing
that you know so
i interviewed people at what was it 24
different institutions or whatnot
and because i was living in boston at
the time when i did most of this
you can just imagine some of the
institutions in and around boston
basically i
visited almost every one of them if they
had a collegial acapella group i was
there
so you might imagine let's say a
prominent
math and technology school in the boston
area you know
maybe it wasn't harvard but it was close
to harvard geographically so you might
imagine an institution there can't think
of one
no exactly and so when i interviewed
some of the students there
i mean their response was you know this
is such
an intense math and science place and
it's just fundamentally unhealthy
if you don't have something to
counterbalance that in a creative area
or something
that is not that it was their belief
that they would just go crazy
you know if they didn't do something to
create some balance in their lives
and so even though it was time consuming
they you know in the kind of risk reward
the return on investment kind of
rationality they definitely all felt
that it was
worthwhile and so you know of all the
people that i've spoken to there's
always
invariably some sort of rationalization
that speaks
to how they think that this is helpful
for their overall well-being and you
know some of them put it more in
physical terms some of them are in
mental you know health and well-being
terms i mean
the terms vary from person to person but
it's kind of a common theme
that despite the time and investment
they
feel like the return outweighs any of
the costs
so what about people who think that okay
that's nice and all like yeah we should
have
we should be healthy mentally physically
but that should occur
outside of school the purpose of school
is to focus on like career readiness so
like how do you respond to people like
that
well yeah and that kind of gets us into
sort of a different area that is
part of the underlying desire to pursue
the leisure
angle you know just as a general lens or
concept for me
is really guided to put it in maybe
fancier
terms it's really for me part of a
neoliberal critique
which is to push back on
the work focused education discourses
that have come to dominate
life in the last 20 to 30 years we
aren't always very good at history i
would say
i happen to love history and you know
john dewey is not that historical but of
course his work is now
getting more like 100 years old-ish and
you know democracy
education his one of his famous books he
had many but that was one
that some of us in education like i
think it was 1916
i think that's about right so around 100
years and democracy and education
is really pretty notable when you look
at it in terms of how
dewey really speaks about education
education's responsibility
for both the vocational and the a
vocational and you know dewey
yes he was part of the progressive
education movement but he was also a
pragmatist
and so american educational thinking
during that time
it's not like people were so
out there in the kind of oh it's just
all liberal education we don't worry
about what people are going to do for a
living
they were very concerned about that they
were very concerned about schooling
as part of vocational preparation
there's no two ways about it
but they treated it as two sides of the
coin
where you had to have a vocational with
it which is to say
if you were not preparing people for
a life as well as a living then that was
negligent and
irresponsible as an educational
institution if so today's
it's just out of control in terms of how
the political right and i don't mean
this in a political commentary sense but
just in the
because it's not even just the political
right actually it's that's
maybe not accurate it's the neo-liberal
forces
that like to make claims
that everyone benefits from a kind of
work-focused education system
the basic rationality being that quality
of life is equivalent to the gross
domestic product
but in fact it's nonsense there's
absolutely no
evidence to pack that up and as a matter
of fact research on quality of life and
happiness for example
shows that there's not only no
correlation with gdp and sometimes
there's an inverse relationship
and if you look at happiness studies for
example which i have i mean it's a field
and i mean the u.s is notoriously lowly
ranked on
studies of happiness quality of life all
of those types of measures that speak to
the kinds of values that one might
imagine might be important to average
people
but instead people have just been bowled
over
by you know let's just say the powerful
in society
who continue to bulldoze
through this really self-serving
discourse
that everything is going to go to hell
in a handbasket if we don't have more
math and science you know stem kind of
educations and
you know it's now disappeared from the
websites but if you can find archival
websites you know
pearson when they were really behind the
common core push you know so prior to
the trump presidency
the common core was like a big thing and
if you read the mission statement of the
common core
it was all about helping students
compete in the global economy
and you know my good friend and
colleague and co-editor on the music
making and leisure book gareth dylan
smith
i remember him i think it was a facebook
post or something that he wrote you know
a while ago
he moved to the u.s they had been living
in england for a long time they moved to
the u.s
and of course he's always fascinated by
some of those cross-cultural comparison
things usually having to do with
language and you know biscuits and
scones and stuff like that
i mean one of the things that he
observed you know as kind of one of
those sort of social observations
was how everyone in the u.s seemed to
believe
that they were you know so proud of
being the winners
of a competition that no one else in the
rest of the world really
knew existed or cared about because no
other country really cares about
being the winner of this global race the
fact that people
continue to believe that if you don't
force students
into you know stem fields that somehow
the u.s is going to fall behind because
that's all part of the the stem
discourse which is
we're going to fall behind that's that's
how you know you invoke fear through
falling behind falling behind and other
countries are going to overtake us this
kind of thing
and the kind of collateral damage with
that is that
anything that doesn't serve that purpose
becomes extraneous and becomes
dispensable and so the idea of educating
for a life
there's no money to be gained in that
that's not gonna in the
simplistic sense of it the gdp is not
going to be
increased by educating people to have a
happy life
when in fact i think you know a more
nuanced understanding would say
actually you know when people are
happier about what they do they tend to
actually be a little bit more productive
so if you really do care about that you
might actually want to do that but
that's like why would you invest in
something like music why would you have
music or arts education in general
unless you could
rationalize it as advancing the gdp
you know yeah i've heard some people
argue well there's not enough time in
the school day for even learning how to
like balance a checkbook like that's for
whatever reason is like a
common phrase even though people don't
have checkbooks anymore but like
it's the concept behind it that i think
they're trying to get at and it's like
okay
well i mean yes you're right we're not
going to have enough time in the school
day for everything
but does that mean that we focus 100 on
career readiness or like what's the
balance that we try and strive for
like do you have an ideal because you
have two daughters like
did you aim for a school that like tried
to strive for a balance between leisure
and work or
was that not a consideration well i mean
i guess
the work non-work sort of leisure versus
work dichotomy
it can be helpful you know and obviously
i talked about dewey and that
combination
of vocation and evocation but especially
now in the in a kind of pandemic and
eventually hopefully post pandemic world
you know i think if there's any
potential silver lining who knows if
it'll materialize but
i think it's really caused so many
people
to reflect upon the
role of work the nature of work their
relationship with work
in ways that has sort of been glossed
over or forgotten about or just flown
under the radar
up until now as everything just
intensifies i think it's
fascinating for so many people who have
now had the kind of
work from home experiences and whether
they think about it in terms of
lines between work and non-work or if
they think about it
in a kind of holistic way you know
because it very much depends i think on
what
the specific nature of work is you know
as a university professor
where is the line between my work and my
leisure i mean it's it kind of blurs i
mean
there are certainly aspects of my job
that
i mean there's no way to paint it as
leisure i mean it's just work it's grunt
work that has to get done and i'm not
talking about anything teaching wise
which i love
but i just mean like there are certain
service things and there are certain
like you can't get away from attending
certain meetings that
i mean what do i get out of that nothing
but when i think about you know
scholarship or even the teaching aspects
i mean
this i find enriching and rewarding and
i think it's good so
to your question when i think about you
know my daughters for example
what i really care about is not so much
work or
non-work but rather their eventual
happiness and well-being
but i think in that sense one of the
things that concerns me
is that they have enough interests
and develop enough skills capacities
dispositions
to be able to avail themselves of those
interests that they can feel
good about their lives and to avoid the
dichotomous
sort of work non-work not everybody has
the same
number of chances and so there are some
people of necessity
they find themselves having to work for
a living
and doing work that is not in any way
rewarding
and can never be rewarding you can try
as you want to but i mean there are some
things that just have to be done and
you know they may not be rewarding so
then how do you construct a wonderful
life a beautiful life
a meaningful life knowing that you have
to do this thing
that is unavoidable because most of us
have to do things you know i have to
take out the trash
and nobody's going to do it for me i
have to do it and i can complain about
it but it has to be done
and you know i can try to make it as
enjoyable as i want to but
at the end of the day it's taking out
the trash but if i have to take out the
trash
what else can i do to live a meaningful
life and
i think that that's where if we can put
our
spotlight there i think it would go a
long way to undoing
some of what i think has been a very
harmful path that we've been on for
a long time i mean just look at what has
become of education i mean it's just a
mess
i mean it's a mess everywhere in the u.s
it's especially a mess because of the
sort of fracturing of the haves and the
have-nots i mean that's a very
unfortunate thing because then
the things that are seen as frivolous or
expendable
are usually the kinds of things
that learners in less well-resourced
areas
you know more impoverished areas the
learners that most
benefit from those things that
value engagement are usually cut
out as saying well no that's what these
people don't need and
it's a travesty it's shameful and it's
hard to believe that anyone
who has a nuanced understanding of
education would ever do that but of
course people think they're
acting in someone else's best interests
and you know no what they really need is
to improve their test scores if they
want to have a shot at a happy life they
need to
yes and so we're going to improve their
test scores by cutting out
all of the things in education that
these students might find
any sort of personal satisfaction from
let's eliminate that from them and let's
turn schooling into the most
the worst drudgery imaginable and that's
going to
help them the most i mean that's
ludicrous right it's just silliness
i'm at an interesting point
professionally where like i'm in two
fields
simultaneously and it's fascinating
seeing like how
different the discourse is around those
fields so like in terms of
funding or national discourse or like
request for
we need to have this in our program in
our school in our district etc
i'm curious what are your thoughts on
what the arts might be able to learn
from computer science and what computer
science might be able to learn from the
art
so like as an example of this course
it was the music for all movement by
nafmy and then there's the computer
science for hours cs4all that's going on
there are two like national movements
and one of them is getting like
millions of dollars in funding and the
other is like a blip on the radar
you may or may not even know that it
exists the amount of like
public outcry like oh well if we don't
have this
my kids future blah blah for computer
science like they're really
passionate about that but then for music
there's also like outcry how are you
going to cut my music program but we're
not going to
give any funding for furthering that et
cetera you know one of my
intellectual inspirations or sources was
the work of
michelle foucault and that was really
helpful for me during my graduate
studies
not that foucault or anyone else has all
the answers but it was just that
when i started to engage with that kind
of thinking
for me what it really did was open my
mind
to a different way of understanding
because you know quite honestly to that
point
i was operating in a pretty naive
realism kind of way
and it was very frustrating because it's
difficult to make sense of the world
when you really are only seeing it one
way
and you know for foucault if you
know about his background he had a
position at the college of france which
was like the most prestigious
educational institution in france and he
had a chair ship and
you got to name your chair ship when you
got hired for those things and it was a
sweet gig
you had to teach one course a year that
was the gig but he called his chairship
the chair of systems of thought and
that's kind of a revealing chairship
when you really stop
if you know anything about his work and
you think oh systems of thought because
you
start thinking about different
rationalities and different logics and
you start to realize you know because
that's
when he started you know you had to do
two dissertations back then
and so one of his was in psychology and
he had this real fascination with
psychology because of the idea of reason
reason and unreason so what is
reasonable you know because then
when you start to dig deeply you start
to realize that insanity
is not a thing it's simply a rationality
it's a way
of thinking it's a way of thinking about
the world and so
everything essentially just boils down
to normative sort of systems or
rationalities
and different logic and so when you
think about the funding for these
different fields
you know the music for all things i mean
everything comes from
a place of situated values so there's
nothing innocent
about the national association for music
education's push
just as there's nothing innocent about
the computer science push i mean the
whole stem thing
was an invention i mean if you've done
the history on stem you know that
the order of the letters used to be
different but then they were like hey
this would be a better branding if we
flip the letters around so it's spelled
stem because of course
that relates to stem cells and that's
like the origin and that's the core
you know they're all those type of
things and then the whole thing also
was just a big marketing ploy there's
nothing inherently
valuable about stem subjects if we can
call them that
i mean it was all just part and when
they do the analysis especially of the
market analysis that's also really
fascinating as well if you've studied
some of that
is there a shortage of stem workers no
in fact there's not
there's a shortage you know in the labor
force there's a shortage in a couple of
niche
little areas and it's more a problem of
distribution in that the people who have
backgrounds in that
don't want to live in some of the places
where the jobs are you know
and it's all messed up but it's all part
of manipulation so people just
manipulate this kind of stuff
to try and advance their own interests
and that's just kind of a human
thing right we all manipulate the
information in ways that we think is
going to advance our own
interests and so the problem i think
is at a certain point if you are an
educator with values that
are situated genuinely
in human welfare i think it does demand
a certain detachment now of course i'm
not suggesting any sort of
objective play there's no point of pure
objectivity when it comes to
human welfare or anything like that but
if a person can attempt to bring a level
of criticality
so if you're in computer science and you
bring a genuine level of criticalities
to start questioning where's this push
coming from
whose interests are being served by this
particular push
and i mean i think you could speak about
this for any endeavor but
i think if there was genuine
conversation
if a person could put the spotlight and
interest on human welfare
rather than a disciplinary self-interest
then
perhaps people could find ways
to question their own practices and
assumptions you know like
i mean what is to be gained from an
interest in computer science well
i mean the people who are into that
obviously love it
hopefully one would assume that the
people who that are
in it genuinely love it as opposed to
feeling like they were pushed into it
because somebody said that that was how
they were going to get the best
high-paying job i mean that seems really
sad to think of it that way
in the same way that hopefully people
that are doing music are doing it
because
they genuinely love it and not because
their parents told them it was going to
make them better people or
they thought they were going to be
smarter you know music makes you smarter
some some goofy thing right and i just
think about and you know
it hasn't come up but i was reminded you
know just this morning when i thought
about
this podcast today and i was reminded
that when i was in boston
i'd been working on this leisure thing
for a little bit not decades but you
know a number of years
and i was doing some literature review
and i came across this dissertation
you know because i put in you know music
and leisure and whatnot and this
dissertation came up
varda shaked or shakehead i don't know
how to pronounce her last name but i did
meet her
because i sought her out you know and i
came across this thing and then i
realized that she was
living in boston so i just i cold called
her and we met for coffee and had a
wonderful conversation and
her dissertation you know the the
meaning of music making for computer
scientists
with serious music making a vocation
what comes out of that dissertation i
think
you know reading it is you just get a
sense of the passion
and it's not like they treated it in
either or terms
i mean they love their music and they
love their computer science and you also
got the sense that because they loved
music so much
in the case of her seven participants
but they didn't want to give up
their engineering or computer science
interests it wasn't like they
went into it for the money it's because
they loved their computer science and
they thought
okay i can still do this music thing in
addition to
my computer science thing whereas maybe
if they had done the music thing
it seems a little bit more unusual to do
like computer science as a hobby not
that people don't i know they do
i just think it was really interesting
in the way that that dissertation made
me
think more deeply about
the fact that those were people who
cared about how they lived life they
loved their music for what it did for
them
something that seems to be pretty common
to a lot of people
who do music what i would call a
vocationally which is to
just kind of skirt the verbiage of you
know leisure time music making or
recreational music making or amateur
right so
some people treat those as pejorative
terms so if you just think about it as a
vocational it's just like
okay they're doing this not for their
primary occupation
if i remember correctly though because
it's been a couple years since i read
that dissertation
the music informed the computer science
and the computer science and form of the
music making so like it had this like
effect where it's like the a vocational
and the vocational both informed each
other and so they were able to learn
from both of them so it was just
interesting like symbiotic relationship
yeah what i take away from it is that
it's not driven
by a specific disciplinary concern
right because again as foucault points
out you know we invented the disciplines
they're not naturally occurring
they're a human construction and so
there is nothing
disciplinary that we should be thinking
about as
in any way driving this bus it's just it
you know when you read their stories
they were just passionate people who
loved stuff they loved learning they
loved
exploring things they loved creating
they loved interacting they liked
thinking about the world in different
ways
you know and then they made some
pragmatic choices in terms of career but
they obviously developed those skills
along the way
they had the music option because
they learned stuff about music they
learned how to make music
in a let's say a trained way not that it
always has to be about that because i
mean we all have
voice everybody can sing but i mean they
instrumentalist most of them you know
and so they played instruments and that
it doesn't come from the sky and it
doesn't these days maybe it can come
from youtube a little bit you can have
some self-starting but for the most part
you know you have some
formalized learning along the way that
develops the capacity so that you can
engage because if you don't have that
entry-level skill
then you know options are cut off to you
and you know back to the story about you
know my own
children i just you know i don't really
care what they do
i mean a little bit yes i said every
parent does but mostly i just care that
they're happy
but i have along the way been concerned
with them developing
certain capacities because if you have
no abilities if you if you can't do
anything
it really cuts off your options as you
get older it's not that you can't learn
new things when you're older
but it's just so much harder i just want
people to be able to
participate in anything that they like
to do and be able to pursue it to
whatever extent they want to pursue it
and to
enjoy it as much as they can if we can
put the emphasis on human enjoyment
human welfare human well-being
then i think some of the distinctions i
mean
yes there's always going to be battles
over scarce resources
but i think those battles can take on
different meanings
if we place the spotlight in different
places but how do you
personally focus on your own welfare
because i know you have many ways
of engaging in leisure outside of just
music making
just like the people at mit for example
who
felt the need to balance out things in
their lives
because i spend so much time in front of
a computer and so much time
reading and thinking and writing and
everything else
because i'm no longer you know actively
teaching music as music
in the way that i used to but then of
late you know i mean i haven't found
people to be playing my saxophone with
when i'm now
picking up the flute and i'm learning
irish flute music you know just for fun
to do that so that's at least one
musical outlet but for the most part you
know i just like to do
physically active things just to balance
out
you know all the reading heavy you know
text computer screen
type of things i mean you got to get
outside you got to do something else so
i like to do that
i did resume my squash career a little
bit and then of course everything got
shut down again so
i like to do sports you know it's more
fun where might people go to connect
with you and the organizations that you
work with
well i think these days anybody can
google anybody so i think i'm
pretty easy to find online i don't do a
ton of like
promotion or anything like that but most
of my stuff is easily
available online and i hope that anybody
listening will at least
take up the opportunity to ask
themselves
you know what they do for enjoyment
outside of or beyond
work or if work is everything i mean
that's fine too but
as long as the question is there like
because i think that's the question that
a lot of people have been
asking themselves now in this kind of
pandemic world is like wait
is work the only thing in my life i mean
do i have nothing
i wake up in the morning do i just go on
the computer and i start working or you
know is there anything else
and with that that concludes this
interview with roger mantei i hope you
enjoyed this episode
and i hope you are considering the
potential for leisure in computer
science education
and if you're interested in learning
more about leisure in computer science
education i highly recommend checking
out the episodes i've done
on modding and mod culture which i will
include a link to
in the show notes if you'd be so kind
please consider sharing this episode
with somebody else who might be
interested in it
but otherwise stay tuned next week for
another unpacking scholarship episode
and two weeks from now for another
interview hope you're staying safe and
are having a wonderful week

Guest Bio

Roger Mantie (PhD) is Associate Professor, Department of Arts, Culture and Media at University of Toronto Scarborough, with a graduate appointment at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He held previous appointments at Arizona State University and Boston University. His teaching and scholarship focus on connections between education and wellness, with an emphasis on lifelong engagement in and with music and the arts. While working in Phoenix he brokered partnerships with the Phoenix Center for the Arts and Mayo Clinic (the latter supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts) to create and study programming focused on community music engagement. In 2019, he helped launch wellness-focused programming in Scarborough retirement residences. A widely-published scholar, researcher, and collaborator, Mantie is co-author of Education, Music, and the Social Lives of Undergraduates: Collegiate A Cappella and the Pursuit of Happiness (Bloomsbury Press), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure (2016). Complete info at rogermantie.com

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Roger’s book titled “Education, Music, and the Lives of Undergraduates: Collegiate A Cappella and the Pursuit of Happiness”
Read more about John Dewey’s book titled Democracy and Education
Read Varda Shaked’s dissertation titled The Meaning of Music-Making for Computer Scientists with a Serious Musing-Making Avocation: A Phenomenological Case Study
Visit Roger’s website
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter