Talk:MayDay Group

The MayDay Group needs to have a Wikipedia page. It is an international professional organization of music educators with a broad membership and (for music education) a long history, which publishes two peer-reviewed journals for the field (ACT and TOPICS), and has held colloquia since the 1990s (this summer will be MDG 30, held in London, Ontario, with Henry Giroux as the keynote. Presenting at these colloquia are also peer-reviewed, and I have many colleagues who have had their presentations rejected. This is not a corporate or fake group, but an embedded organization in music education scholarship (I review articles for TOPICS and am the NAfME Creativity SRIG Chair-elect; and many music education scholars do work in both organization, despite the founders seeing it as an alternative to NAfME). When I look at the "" category, there is only one organization there with a similar (and superior) history and reach, NAfME (which is quite a bit more corporate in orientation, and publishes more peer-reviewed journals). More specific music education organizations are on the list, (e.g., ACDA, AOSA; they serve music educators interested in a specific subset, in this instance choral conductors, and Orff-Schulwerk general music educators; and each have a practitioner journal, but I don't know if its peer-reviewed not belonging to either organization), but the MayDay Group, like NAfME, serves music education more broadly. Further, there are a bunch of "organizations" on there that are indeed nothing but corporate advertisements (e.g., BandQuest, and don't actually serve the music education profession or scholarly community. Music education is a small scholarly community, so I am trying to be the music education expert here for non-experts who don't understand the lay of the land. Here is a link to my Google Scholar, which is a free way to get a gauge on a researcher. I have published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles in Music Education journals (Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education; Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education; Music Educators Journal; TOPICS for Music Education Praxis, Research Studies in Music Education, and others) and a research monograph with Routledge (and since Music Education is primarily an articles-based discipline, and only 3 major publishers even consider publishing music education scholarship, each music education monograph is important), and I taught in the Pittsburgh Public Schools for 11 years, and currently teach at Penn State Altoona. I don't do this to blow my ego up, but to try to make you understand that this is my area of expertise, and its not a big enough field to have broad interest (unlike other music fields, such as popular music studies, or music psychology, which are huge fields). Still, if Wikipedia will be more than corporate advertisements, it must have a page on the MayDay Group. I have embedded links in this comment, rather than referencing, in this comment, as I hope that will be easier for whoever makes the final decision on this type of work. I've seen a ton of less-deserving content in my decade of using Wikipedia as a teaching source that's basic tech advertisement so it would be nice for an important nonprofit, with a more democratic governance structure that critiques corporatism, racism, sexism, and such on Wikipedia. Wikipedia looses out when it has reference to corporations with no service to my field, but not the primary actors at the organizational level. If there is a problem with the construction of the site itself, I look for help with that. From the comment on the initial MayDay Group submission I made, I had assumed it just needed to be rewritten in my own words (which I then did). Sincerely, Dr. Shevock