I had a model music curriculum dream

Last night I had a remarkably vivid dream. It was most remarkable for the detail that it contained. My dreams are more usually amorphous affairs.

This is what I dreamt.

The expert panel for the new model music curriculum had issued an interim report. The panel had wisely started with first principles and considered the place of music within a general education for all children and young people to age 14. An over arching music educational aim was proposed that was consonant with the aims of general education.

To musically equip children and young people to understand themselves, both as individuals and as members of a complex and rapidly changing society as future citizens in that democratic society.

The panel had assumed that the resourcing of this education would be vastly improved, and in particular, in respect to the education and training of music teachers, curriculum time allocation and physical resources.

The panel went on to outline three sub-purposes.

Sub-purposes:

To equip all pupils with the knowledge, skills, dispositions and understandings to make music well.

To induct pupils into existing cultures of making-music as a source of creative and critical engagement.

 To enable all children to become unique individuals, subjectively enriched and able to know a sense of personal freedom through music made well.

The panel then made what can only be seen as a bold step. They realised that before proceeding any further some understanding of curriculum was needed. This is what they proposed.

The music curriculum can be defined as a dynamic set of musical processes and practices framed within historical and contemporary cultural discourse and dialogue that comprise the material musical encounters of pupils and teachers.

And then to curriculum intentions.

By the end of Year 9 pupils will have songs, melodies, riffs, rhythms and the character-feel of much music in their heads and bodies. They will be able to recall this music at will. It will be an integral part of their learning how to make music well as shown in their technical know how, fluency, expressive control and in their musical relationships with others.

This will be achieved by introducing contextually rich music/musical material which keeps offering fresh insights and challenges. Pupils will explore unexpected pathways into deeper learning, responding with flexibility to follow new turnings.

The pupil’s music making will always reach a musically meaningful standard. When this is achieved there will be value in assessing the work.

Pupils will be able to reflect on their music making and the music making of others through talk, reading and writing about music.

They will come to understand how music functions in the world, why and how it is made, how music is used and how music is given meaning. There will be a recognition that music has ‘human interest’; social, cultural and political.

Classes will work as a community of music makers and critics where the relationship between pupil, teacher and what is being learnt creates an open musical discourse.

As the panel retired to do more work they heard from the minister that a new panel would be assembled shortly. He thanked them for their work.

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We are the knowledge rich music makers

Music of the Common TongueMusic published in 1987 has a sub-title: ‘Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music’. Here Christopher Small examines the search for identity and community of millions of Africans in the Americas through their encounter with a European tradition, taking from it what was needed to explore, celebrate and affirm who they were and who they might become. 

Small makes clear:

‘My first assumption is that music is not primarily a thing or a collection of things, but an activity in which we engage … the act of musicking is central to the whole art of music the world over. In most of the world’s musical cultures this is taken for granted without even having to think about it; it is only the dominance of the classical tradition that obliges us to state it so bluntly.’ [1]

This is 1987 the same year as Alperson’s ‘What is music?’ An introduction to the philosophy of music giving rise to wider interest in music as a social practice and David Elliot’s 1995 philosophy of music education.

In 2012, and quite by chance, a visit to my sister in the North East of England coincided with the Durham Miner’s Gala.  So, on the train to Durham, down the hill from the railway station and as the street narrowed there was the banner of Thirslington Miners’ Lodge, their brass band and a tightly packed crowd together ‘musicking’.  Here and now the music being lived, giving meaning to the lives of all those gathered. As the band came to the end of their piece they created a rumble effect, low quiet trilling and a signal to the crowd to urge the band to reprise the piece just played which of course they did to the delight of all. Meaning being made through acts of ‘self definition, an exploration, an affirmation and a celebration of one’s identity, of who one is’. [2]

Later I followed the band in procession to the cathedral – the preacher the turbulent priest Giles Fraser and we sang Jerusalem. I had heard it earlier in the day on TV coming from Trent Bridge cricket ground used as part of the pre-match phantasmajorics. And then I thought about how Parry’s setting had first been used by a Women’s Peace movement during the First World War and it will be heard again at the Last Night of the Proms. On each occasion understood differently, the music living within webs of meaning as Chris Philpott would say. [3 ]

A conundrum for me in the thinking of Small is his insistence that musicking has no moral dimension. It is not a matter of good or bad musicking. There is just musicking. The idea is ethically neutral.

Small’s insistence that musicking is to be seen as being beyond ethical consideration is out of tune with much contemporary philosophy of music education which sees music education as being essentially ethical in nature. Wayne Bowman, arguing for thinking of music education as induction into a set of musical practices points out that musical practices like ‘Human practices are places where we learn and rehearse right action: where we learn to formulate and address the fundamental human question, what kind of person it is good to be, what kind of people we wish to become. Practices, musical and others, are where we learn our most important lessons about who we are and who we aspire to become. On this account, human practices [including musical practices] are profoundly important ethical resources.’ [4]

But what could we take from Small into a music education that is in the institution of the school and sponsored by the state?

A little time ago at the  ISM ‘Guide to Progression, curriculum and assessment’ day we had plenty of opportunity to talk and think around the topic in the light of a new National Curriculum. This involved thinking about the values and vision that we hold for music teaching at Key Stage 3 (age 11-14).  

Before I sounded forth in our small group discussion I did say that I had had a long time to think about this. I should have added that I have enjoyed the privilege of bringing together the ideas generated by the classroom research of secondary school music teachers. This has involved a dialogue between my evolving ideas, their ideas and reflection on the realities of the classroom, what works and what might work better. And what is thought to be worthwhile in the name of a music education. Somewhere in this is the voice of Christopher Small.

1. Each class is thought of as a community of music-makers. The class take it as given that they will be sounding out music together for much of the time as singers and players. They will learn to ‘face each other’ musically. [5]

2. Great store will be given to the climate of the classroom where every person will be heard musically and known as a shaper of the curriculum that will unfold. This will involve establishing ‘voice protocols’ that contribute to the social dynamics of the classroom, the subtleties of pedagogy and the growing trust created between teacher and pupil, and pupil and pupil.  

3. The teacher will be instructor, facilitator and mediator. By mediator I mean that the teacher is respected for knowing good musical places to go, for being ‘the more knowledgeable other’ and the bearer of culture. The teacher brings to the classroom what will take pupils to musical places unimaginable.

These will be powerful stimulants all with human interest, provoking enquiry, curiosity and questions that will have no answers as the conversation continues, and as meaning is made through a relational pedagogy where teacher, pupil and what is being learnt enable all to say ‘this is who we are’. 

And we are the knowledge rich music makers with a window into beauty and truth.

Notes:

[1] Small, C. (1987) Music of the Common Tongue. John Calder. Pages 50-51.

[2] Small, C. (2011) Prologue: Misunderstanding and Reunderstanding, in (eds.) Felicity Laurence and Olivier Urbain, Music and Solidarity. Transaction Publishers. Page (xi)

[3] See chapter 4 ‘The Justification for Music in the Curriculum’ in (eds.) Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce, Debates in Music Teaching. Routledge: London.

[4] See https://jfin107.wordpress.com/scholarly-paper-the-ethical-significance-of-music-making-by-wayne-bowman/

[5] On ‘musical facing’ see https://jfin107.wordpress.com/through-the-lens-of-levinas-practices-of-facing-in-the-music-classroom-and-beyon

2019: the year of curriculum intent

A happy new to my readers who now populate 124 countries of the world. Music education would seem to have a global speak.

In 2018 I have had something of an obsession with the question of knowledge and its complexities in the case of music. There are some twenty blogs on the topic. There will a good amount of repetition no doubt. However, attention to the nature of musical knowledge has never been more critical in view of the official way in which knowledge is being conceptualised as part of curriculum reform in England.

The Greeks had some twelve words for knowledge. The Germans and French have at least two and in all three cases the distinction is made between a scientific form of knowing, knowing that something is the case, and other forms of knowing. The Greek words techne (art, craft, skill) and phronesis (prudence) offer ways of knowing that have ethical significance, for example.

The dominant discourse in England speaks of bodies of knowledge and it is ‘knowing that’ into which all other murmurings of ways of knowing are collapsed.

2019 in England will be the year when our schools will be re-setting their curriculum statements. You see there are the three Is – Intent; Implementation; Impact.

These are the markers set down by Ofsted, the school’s inspection body in England.

Ofsted is the piper that calls the tune in England. [1]

Sean Harford HMI, National Director for Education at OFSTED clarifies what is to be understood by the three Is.

‘The curriculum is a framework for setting out the aims of a programme of education, including the knowledge and understanding to be gained at each stage (Intent); for translating that framework over time into a structure and narrative, within an institutional context (Implementation); and for evaluating what knowledge and understanding pupils have gained against expectations (Impact.achievement)’ [2]

Knowledge and understanding. No mention of skills.

Just think about the wonder of what we understand as a musical skill. The crafting of a musical phrase, the placing of a sound within a sea of silence …

And what kind of knowledge will Ofsted have in mind?

And what of musical understanding?

Musical understanding is defined by cognitive psychologist John Sloboda as akin to getting a joke – music understood without the mediation of language. I am the music while the music lasts.

Perhaps behind the scenes is an ideological conflation of a narrow conception of culture with a narrow conception of knowledge.

Notes:

[1] Many of my world-wide readers may find it difficult to comprehend how it is that a school’s monitoring body can be such a powerful agent of change, acting as the chief re-contextualiser of the field. (See Basil Bernstein on the Official Re-contextualising Field ((ORF)))

Ofsted operate without fear or favour creating fear and trembling.

[2] Source not known but taken from a consultant’s powerpoint slide.

Local Knowledge this Christmas Time

Better try over number seventy-eight before we start I suppose?’ said William, pointing to a heap of old Christmas carol books on a side table. [2]

Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, like much of his writing, contains references to music-making. Hardy’s interest in the social conditions of his characters is matched by interest in the social conditions of their music-making.

For Hardy music is social practice. Musical meanings and musical knowledge are made here and now together and bound to the meanings made through the relationships of those participating. And all this in relationship to their place in the social order.

In the case of Under the Greenwood Tree there is the story of the Melstock choir, a band of local musicians playing and singing in the west gallery of their village church. Their music is silenced by the installation of the organ and a well-tutored organist. The imagined mediocrity of the locals is replaced by the imagined more refined and civilising sounds of the organ and the organist’s playing.

The musically disenfranchised locals inhabiting Hardy’s rural Wessex had come to enjoy in Michael Gove’s words:

‘… a shared appreciation of cultural reference points, a common stock of knowledge on which all can draw, and trade, in a society in which we all understand each other better’. . . [3]

Well, of course, I am being a little facetious, for Michael Gove was not referring to local traditions, such as Hardy’s musicians and their customs held in common, but to the proposition that:

‘… there is such a thing as the best. Richard Wagner is an artist of sublime genius and his work is incomparably more rewarding – intellectually, sensually and emotionally – than, say, the Arctic Monkeys’. [4]

Or shall we say, not the Arctic Monkeys but the carollers on the western edge of Sheffield  whose singing this Christmas-time makes connections with that nearly lost repertoire of Hardy’s childhood time and now lost to the Christmas canon. [5]

Ah! ‘the best of the musical canon’, where have I heard that?

Here are two utterly different conceptions of what music is, what it is for, how it is educative; what culture is and what it is for.

While there is the knowledge of the powerful [6] exemplified in the edicts of our cultural administrators, it may be the carollers at the Sportsman Inn who will be in touch with incomparably more knowledge of music as a human practice and perhaps, just perhaps, of humanity too.

‘Number seventy-eight was always a teaser – always. I can mind him ever since I was growing up a hard boy-chap. But he’s a good tune, and worth a mint o’ practice.’ [7]

Wishing you a very happy Christmas!

Notes:

[1] First published Christmas 2014.

Readers will find a number of previous blogs dealing with the idea of culture. This blog connects well with ‘How culture counts for music education’ https://wordpress.com/post/jfin107.wordpress.com/1038

[2] Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy, London, MacMillan, 1964 page 24.

[3] Gove, M. (2011) The need to reform the education system. Speech made at the University of Cambridge, November 24.

[4] Ibid.

[5] ‘Pubs preserve the carols dusted away by the Victorians. Guardian, Monday 15 December 2014 page 5.

See http://www.localcarols.org.uk/sings.php for this year’s programme of singing.

[6] Michael Young contrasts ‘The knowledge of the powerful’ with ‘powerful knowledge’. See http://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/revistaesc/ESC32/ESC32_Arquivo.pdf I have simply appropriated the phrase ‘powerful knowledge’ here and don’t necessarily imply anything of Young’s thesis, interesting though that is.

[7] I do concede that I am in some part a romantic. Philosopher Michel Foucault notes that nostalgia can be a rich source of critique should readers think I am indulging.

What was your take away?

A couple of weeks ago some three hundred music educators gathered for the annual Musicmark conference.

Matt Griffith tweeted:

Main observation #MusicMark2018 was a collective will to innovate & change. Informed by & with young people, their lives in music, and acting on the school challenges we face. We can stand still, observe & moan or step up & transform. I’m totally for the latter #musicalinclusion

I responded:

I took away from the @musicmarkuk conference the continuing need to debate and determine the purposes of music education; the extent to which those [purposes] relating to music in school as part of a general education differ from those beyond the school, for example. @mattgriff1968

Let me explain.

My perspective as a former secondary school music teacher comes from within the school, the traditions of music as a school subject, its debates and vigorous contestations over the last century and a half and the enduring commitment to musically educate all children and young people as part of a general education. Yes, a general education, not a specialist one.

In this view a music education is not something apart. It is called upon to have allegiances with the aims of education as a whole, that is, a general education for all children and young people sponsored by the state and which is compulsory. In this view it has a responsibility to the whole educational endeavour to which all children and young people are entitled. Otherwise, why include music in the curriculum?

Have you heard these kinds of sentiments?

Put the child at the centre of music education;

Release the musical potential of all children;

Ensure all children develop a strong musical identity;

Become and be musicians;

Ensure musical health and wellbeing for all.

These are the kinds of beliefs that come to be expressed as the purposes of music education. They frequently become translated into advocacy statements and at that point too easily becoming promises that can’t be kept.

But while all being admirable and desirable, are the sentiments above sufficient if music is to be a subject of the school curriculum, a dynamic part of the whole that is a general education?

What if we started from a general educational aim.

John Beck offers one such worthy aim.

‘Equipping young people to understand themselves, both as individuals and as members of complex, rapidly changing societies …’ [1]

It wouldn’t require much tweeking to create a worthy music educational aim.

But we might note that here the individual child is held in relationship to society. Education is more than for the benefit of the child.

Beck goes on to point out that such an aim is grounded in a concern for children as future citizens in a democratic society. So straight away there seems to be rather more depth to the project that is educate than heard in music education advocacy statements.

And further still, that to do this effectively ‘would involve empowering students to see through the various forms of distorted communication that shape everyday consciousness …’ [2]

Well, this is stronger stuff and might well inform the kinds of aims we set forth in respect to a music education as part of a general education?

I am not sure. What do yo think?

Well, at least we have travelled beyond the popularist sentiments relating to ‘placing the child at the centre of music education’ and its tendency towards rhetorical advocacy; and perhaps opened up some space in which the aims of a music education for all children and young people as part of a general education (represented by the school) might be debated and determined, and distinguished from, compared with and perhaps harmonised with the purposes of music education from beyond the school.

Oh, and did anybody else think that much of what was being described as research at the conference was oddly research that was built upon the sand of not knowing what was already known? Is this really a good basis for innovation and change?

And to end three questions for debate.

1.What does it mean to be musically educated as part of a general education for all children and young people to age 16?

2.To what extent should the purposes of music education address the nature of music as a human practice historically and contemporaneously manifest in the world? (Ontology)

3.What kind of knowledge and ways of knowing should a music education be most concerned with? (Epistemology)

Notes:

[1] Beck, J. (2013) Powerful knowledge, esoteric knowledge, curriculum knowledge. Cambridge Journal of Education Vol.43, No. 2, page 187.

[2] Op cit.

The greatness and limitations of theory: the case of Cognitive Load Theory and its application to music

@WRoberts3 Crickey. Have others seen this? Amazing example of why REAL (not this) music instruction is so profoundly valuable in a rounded education. Telling that they had to go all the way to America to find a musician who thinks cognitive load theory is a good foundation for a lesson.

It was this, an example of Cognitive Load Theory in practice, that came via twitter as part of the ‘every teacher should know’ movement.

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT)  is an example of the current interest in, and promotion of theories thought to improve classroom practice and children’s learning. ‘CLT’, ‘interleaving’, ‘dual coding’, ‘retrieval practice’, ‘Direct Instruction’; these are amongst the ideas abroad at this time. The example above is just one attempt to contextualise such ideas in the case of a particular subject. And it is at this point that problems can arise.

Before examining the example above, it is helpful to point out that this new science of learning, of which CLT is an exemplar, places great emphasis on the role of memory in learning, and in particular, the building of long-term memory. In this CLT claims high status; it seeks to explain the relationship between working memory and long term memory. And within this discourse there are some who see the goal of education as a matter of expanding long term memory or if you prefer, knowing lots of stuff.

Usha Goswami writes:

‘Working memory is a working store of information that is held in mind for a brief period of time, in a ‘mental workspace’ where it can be manipulated. For example, ‘verbal working memory’ is the capacity to hold information verbally in mind, perhaps while seeking somewhere to write it down.’ There is also ‘visuo-spatial working memory’, the ability to hold information in the ‘mind’s eye’. [1]

Usha doesn’t venture further with her examples. But what about ‘musical working memory’, the capacity to hold a musical idea in mind, in the ‘mind’s ear’.

Oh, now we can expose the paucity of the example above, and as Gary Spruce pointed out, its utter ontological failure in respect to music.

But wait, some more explanation.

‘The cognitive load involved in a task is the cognitive effort (or the amount of information processing) required by a person to perform this task’. [2]

The central issue is the need to avoid cognitive overload. The reader may be already ‘glazing over’ at this point. If this is the case you are experiencing cognitive overload and I should have further broken down the information that I am presenting into more discrete elements. This would enable the building of a comprehensive picture of CLT and the issues arising. If there is cognitive overload then learning will be impaired if not negated, and long-term memory left deprived of new knowledge.

In the example the teacher is given a choice:

‘[The teacher] could represent the two sources of information visually as text and a diagram, and make sure they are physically integrated (Strategy 5, page 21). Or, she could present the two sources of information using both auditory and visual channels of communication. She decides to use the second approach.’ [3]

What is of note here is that what is referred to as the auditory channel is Usha’s ‘verbal working memory’. But what about the auditory channel being the music itself.

There is no mind’s ear in play.

Is it worth making a fuss about this?

Well, yes. Because it is an example of the dispensation of theory through limited understanding of the nature of music. The purveyors of the evidence informed/research informed movement, almost invariably fail to grasp the essential non-verbal nature of music, being ignorant of centuries of music educational pedagogical wisdom and the subtle role of verbal mediation in music instruction.

Within some of our schools CLT is likely to be flavour of the month. For the last decade at least, music teachers have been struggling to cope with the misrecognition of what is the nature of musical knowledge and experience seeing them coerced into demonstrating learning in unmusical ways.

So how did all those songs get into your head? Can it be explained by CLT?

Do music teachers really need to know about CLT?

Notes:

[1] Goswami, U. (2014) Child Psychology: A Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

[2] Reif, F. (2010) Applying Cognitive Science to Education. Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

For clear exposition of CLT see https://impact.chartered.college/article/shibli-cognitive-load-theory-classroom/

[3] See here     https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01443410701369146

I wonder if this inspired the example provided.

And what does page 25 have to say?

 

Phronesis and knowledge organisers

As something of an afterthought to my ten part consideration of ‘knowledge richness’ and its emotively charged satelites offering visions of knowledge goodness, I realise that my final example in part 10 was an attempt to reveal:

‘Phronesis (Ancient Greek: φρόνησῐς, translit. phrónēsis) is an Ancient Greek word for a type of wisdom or intelligence. It is more specifically a type of wisdom relevant to practical action, implying both good judgement and excellence of character and habits, or practical virtue.’ [Google]

In so far as I am claiming to be wise I must add that I am growing old and at least in that respect feel that I may be entitled to do so.

The music in the gym this morning was very loud. Radio 1 easily overpowered my iPod choice this morning, the Lesser Litany of Thomas Tallis. Oh, the uses to which music is put.

I politely asked the receptionist whether users of the gym liked the music to be so loud and was Radio 1 the preferred option. This unsurprisingly was not known. But they would look into it. Well, I have started a conversation at least. I wonder how it will conclude.

OK, I just need to get some better earphones.

I sometimes propose that the purpose of music making in school is to enable music to be made well. And you say, what on earth does that mean? Well, the ‘well’ bit can be elaborated through phronesis. We should note that it is a practical form of knowledge melting into oblivion any skills-knowledge dualism.

Of course, phronesis won’t fit into a knowledge organiser.