Dr Michael B. MacDonald is an ethnomusicologist of popular music at the University of Alberta. In 2010-2011 he held a postdoctoral teaching and research fellowship in Canadian Folk Music and currently is a postdoctoral researcher at the UofA Centre for Teaching and Learning where he is working on a research project that brings Critical Pedagogy to popular music education in an approach he calls Critical Listening.

Critical Listening is an exploration of listening for democratic arts education practice. This project explores the development of critical listening as an already culturally embedded learning model in oral/aural cultural practice that may be complimented by critical pedagogy for the development of student’s critical consciousness.

This is the continuation of previous research which focused on community music and collective action and its interface with the industrialization of music culture. Michael is particularly interested in the roles music and aesthetics play in the production of subjectivity, belonging, critical awareness, individual and social health, ecology, and the creation of more democratic, equitable, and just communities. 

He teaches courses in the history of popular music, the music industry, urban music, and folk music from an engaged and critical orientation--drawing from critical pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology of music, music psychology, and ethnomusicology--to accompany students in the development of socially oriented critical thinking skills.

Michael founded Sound and Noise in 2009, an electronic journal and blog, in an effort to provide his Popular Music students with an opportunity to gain practical and professional experience in music criticism, media literacy in the digital humanities, and critical writing.

This year Michael was nominated for an Undergraduate Award in Teaching Excellence by the Collective Body of Arts Students, was the winner of the Society for American Music’s Cambridge University Press Award for a paper co-authored with Dr. Mary Ingraham, and was the University of Guelph, School of Fine Art and Music's first Distinguished Early Career Scholar.

Michael is currently running a Critical Pedagogy Reading Group on campus: click here for more information