Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ed.D. Program: Cassandra L. DeVita “Between Mandate and Reality: How PreK–8 General Music Educators Navigate Inclusive Practice in New Jersey”

In New Jersey, PreK–8 general music educators work under a dual mandate. Federal disability law requires meaningful access for students with disabilities, and state standards require sequential music instruction for every student. Both mandates meet in the same room, with no guarantee that the educator has the information, staffing, or materials needed before the lesson begins. Many music educators enter the field with little music-specific preparation for teaching students with disabilities. Willingness is not the issue. Many educators support inclusion and still feel underprepared. Beyond preparation, access to student information, collaboration with special educators, planning time, staffing, materials, and administrative support all shape what educators can sustain, and those conditions vary widely across districts. When supports are missing or delayed, educators still find ways to respond, often through informal workarounds rather than reliable institutional systems.

Placement in a general music classroom is not the same as meaningful inclusion. Guided by Critical Disability Studies and Systems Thinking, this study shifts attention away from locating barriers within individual students and toward the structures, routines, and resource decisions that shape participation, and how those conditions affect one another. This multimodal, qualitative multiple-case study will examine how PreK–8 general music educators in two New Jersey public school districts with contrasting resource and organizational conditions carry out the same inclusion mandate. Two to four educators from each district will complete a contextual survey, submit three to five photographs or de-identified videos with written reflections, and participate in a semi-structured interview centered on their artifacts. Analysis will occur within each district, then across both. A spring 2026 pilot study with two educators tested and refined these procedures.

This study does not evaluate whether districts are meeting the mandate, and it is not a call for music educators to do more with less. It asks what educators are doing to make inclusion meaningful, not just compliant, how they define meaningful inclusion, and what conditions help or limit that work. By documenting educators’ inclusive practices, this study makes visible the conditions that, in educators’ accounts, shape meaningful inclusion, and the institutional supports that may make it more possible and sustainable in general music classrooms.