Making Sense of Music Education: From Theory to Practice

1.

I finally came across a clear explanation of teaching philosophies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I mean Thomas Fienberg’s discussion of “How Contemporary Is Contemporary?”, which draws a line from Orff-Keetman Schulwerk and Kodály-inspired music education through Comprehensive Musicianship and Creative Music Movement to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Informal Learning. Such a clear picture of music education approaches, and of the NSW curriculum's place within this narrative, should be the first thing anyone interested in education in NSW should have. Part of my confusion, and my need for this clarification, came from being new to Australian music education. I was not born in Australia and did not attend an Australian school. My own music education was also not the kind of education you would receive in a developed country.

Brad Fuller’s Is What Works Best, Best for Music Education? (2022) was another eye-opening piece I read recently. It is a critical discussion of teaching strategies that any teacher should read. Besides, the short, fun podcast that Tom kindly created as an overview of Comprehensive Musicianship and a summary of Brad’s article also included some very interesting observations:

Up until the 1960s, music class was just music appreciation. It was like looking at a cake through a window instead of actually getting into the kitchen to bake it.

If you want original Australian music, you cannot just teach kids to read all European sheet music; you have to force them to compose their own. That requirement made a Deweyan, constructivist, and experiential philosophy right into the NSW Years 7–10 syllabus. Constructivist in this context means that students construct their own understanding by doing the work rather than only absorbing theory from a teacher.

Fuller advocates for explicit learning: the teacher steps down from being the ultimate authority at the front of the room and becomes an active, passionate co-learner alongside the students.

Brad explains the Comprehensive Musicianship Movement in his review of the literature in this way:

The American-based Contemporary Music Project – also known as the Comprehensive Musicianship Movement – calls for the ‘integration and synthesis of musical content and experiences’. In this approach, students ‘find justification for the application of theoretical principles from their study of musical compositions and in their performances, rather than from didactic musical examples in a textbook’ alongside the teacher as ‘co-learner with his (sic) students’ in a ‘community of experience’ (Willoughby, 1971).” (in Fuller, 2022, p. 5)

This is what Brad himself does in his popular and jazz music courses at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I have witnessed firsthand how effective, engaging, and humane this approach is.

2.

Professional Experience for teachers is, by nature, a challenging task. You basically walk into a school halfway through a term, where you do not know anyone, and teach topics you have not chosen to students you do not know.

Beyond that, my greatest challenges during PEx were three things: A) Most of the students were into popular music genres, particularly rock music, which I find hard to understand and connect with. B) The staffroom was overcrowded, and I could not be productive with my lesson planning in that environment. C) All areas of the school were so cold that it significantly affected my mental and physical health. That experience would have been different if I had a say in any of those aspects.

But there were many great moments, too. One was the opportunity to co-teach a visual arts class at the request of the visual arts teacher. The students were discussing the works of Iranian-Australian artist Hossein Valamanesh, which gave me a chance to learn about the artist and talk to the students about Iranian art. Another positive experience was creating a short guitar teaching resource for my music students. It proved effective and engaging, and I used it in different classes. We eventually kept it as a resource for the school.

One moment of angst was a particularly challenging class that went almost completely out of control. This was mostly due to an unstructured classroom setting. The next day, I taught the same class with a different seating arrangement, and it was a totally different experience.

For obvious reasons, I approached my first PEx too cautiously. For me, it was basically about “getting past the intimidation factor” - a phrase I am borrowing from Kuhn and Heins (2021), who use it in a different context. Next time, I want to dive into pretty much everything.