‘Musical’ music teaching in UK

primary education: putting into words

the need to get away from words

Talking about not talking

Ruth Atkinson April 2016

Plymouth Institute of Education, Plymouth University
 overview

• In primary schools, many music lessons are not musical enough ….

• …. so as a teacher-educator, I am careful to model 'musical' teaching
• I don't think I explain what I'm doing very well to the student teachers
• I wanted to find out how other teacher-educators in this field
articulate what’s going on, pedagogically, in ‘musical’ music lessons
• It turns out that I am not alone in struggling to articulate this
• One shared concept has emerged, with implications for my work
example
‘musical’ music teaching in schools?

… in too many instances there was insufficient emphasis

on active music-making or on the use of musical sound as
the dominant language of learning. Too much use was
made of verbal communication and non-musical activities.
Put simply, in too many cases there was not enough music
in music lessons. (OFSTED, 2012a)
music akin to an additional language

Musical sound should be the ‘target’ language of the music

classroom; pupils should be learning to use and interpret
that language confidently and with increasing accuracy. ….
The development of pupils’ aural understanding of musical
sound is central to good teaching and learning over time.
(OFSTED, 2012b)
Although language teachers should be working in the
target language, the educators of those teachers need
also to verbalise the what, how and why of doing so, on a
number of levels.

Such articulation and discussion of pedagogy is well

established in the field of language teaching, which has
an extensive literature, shared vocabulary and well-
developed theoretical frameworks (e.g. Richards and
Rodgers, 1986; Crystal, 1987; University of Cambridge
Local Examination Syndicate, 2010; 2011).
I am good at working in the ‘target language’ of music
with my students, but find it harder to articulate fully
what I’m doing or why.

Unless I can ‘tell’ as well as ‘show’, I am not supporting

every facet of my students’ experiential learning process
(Dewey, 1939; Schön, 1983; Kolb, 1984; Moon, 2004).

reflecting on the language-teaching analogy

 research design

Since my research is inductive and exploratory (Creswell, 2013; Mertens, 2015)

and not just because words are my data (Punch, 2009; Braun & Clarke, 2013),
I have used a qualitative approach with a fairly tight design (Flick, 2015).

It focuses on:
… processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or
measured…[but that stress] … the socially constructed nature of reality, the
intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the
situational constraints that shape inquiry.
(Denzin and Lincoln, 2000, p8)
‘All researchers bring values to a study, but qualitative researchers
make their values known’ (Creswell, 2013, p20).

I include humanism, optimism, social justice, the importance of

children and of education among my values.

My beliefs about knowledge and learning are constructivist. Dewey’s

Pragmatic ‘philosophy of action’ resonates with me (Biesta and
Burbules, 2003; Mertens, 2015).

me in my research
 interviewing

I wanted to know how my participants verbalised their

thoughts ‘in real time’. Their fluency was part of the data I
wished to collect. I therefore conducted and recorded
individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews (Punch,
2009), posing three main questions:
1. How would you define ‘musical teaching’, as
opposed to teaching about music, in a primary
classroom setting?

2. What kinds of things is the teacher doing when

they are ‘teaching musically’?

3. What might the children be learning?

As Punch (2009) points out, an interview ‘is a very good way
of accessing people’s perceptions, meanings, definitions of
situations and constructions of reality’ (p144).

Each interview was a ‘professional conversation, with the

goal of getting a participant to talk about their experiences
and perspectives, and to capture their language and
concepts, in relation to a topic that (I) have determined’
(Braun and Clarke, 2013, p77, original emphases).
 interviewees

My strategy for selecting participants was purposeful and also

opportunistic (Creswell, 2013; Mertens, 2015).

Each interviewee works in the HE ITE sector in England and has a

direct and significant responsibility for educating student
teachers in how to teach class music in primary schools.
My sample size is small, partly because the relevant population is
also small. Despite this, it was possible to conduct useful
thematic analysis of the data (Braun and Clarke, 2013).
 transcription

Since I am interested in the articulacy of my interviewees, I

deployed ‘naturalized transcription, where utterances are
transcribed in as much detail as possible …’ (Oliver, Serovich
and Mason, 2005, p1275).
shorthand meaning
recorded interview time-reference on left, in minutes and seconds from start
of interview e.g. 7:36
interviewee plain text
interviewer italicised text
interrupted word hanging hyphen e.g. t-
interrupted sentence dash e.g. but it’s - they are also
significant pause ….
response/non-response ‘tokens’ transcribed e.g. yeah, um, er, ah,
mmm
word significantly emphasised underlined
short interjection from other speaker [in square brackets and plain/italicised]
non-verbal sound described in brackets e.g. (laughs)
word not clear possible alternatives given e.g. to/the
 data coding and analysis

As Braun and Clarke (2013, p225) point out, themes do not simply
emerge, pre-existent, from qualitative data. They have to be
created, not discovered, through an active process.

• I read and re-read my data considering possible themes, rather as I

would approach cryptic crossword clues.
• I referred back to my questions;
• I examined the words and descriptions actually present in the data;
• I kept my mind open for sudden associations of ideas.
1. conception of a ‘musical’ lesson
2. lapses in fluency when talking about ‘teaching
musically’
3. use of terminology
4. relationship between ‘teacher’ and ‘musician’

themes that emerged

conception of a ‘musical’ lesson

What makes a music lesson interviewee’s implied perspective

‘musical’?
children being active being the adult in the lesson, the
experienced musician working with less
experienced co-musicians (the children)

it is all about sound being a teacher-educator helping to develop

new teachers’ capabilities
it is about the specific moved between the learner’s perspective
practices that musicians and that of a scholar viewing the lesson in
engage in sociological terms
 lapses in fluency when talking about
‘teaching musically’

Um, I think they are – well obviously they … they are…. looking at
ways of … getting music out of the children, um, and using - I think
they’re using their own musicality to do that and  I, I think they ….
ohh, I’m not describing it very well!  (interview 1)

You can only show it. You cannot - yeah - you cannot tell it. It’s so
difficult to articulate some of these things around - it’s the same
with dance and art I think as well. …. And trying to explain to your
team things like this and get a dialogue going about stuff like this
is really hard. Because you can’t really articulate …  (interview 2)
use of terminology

All three interviewees freely used a wide variety of

musical terminology during the interviews.

However there was great variation in their use of

‘teacherly’ terminology:
 ‘teacherly’
terminology used
 relationship between ‘teacher’ and ‘musician’

… [schools] are getting musicians coming in. So that must make a

difference. Yup. They will see the world very differently from a
primary teacher who - well - one, either a primary teacher who
teaches music because they have to not because they like it and
then this middle thing, this middle beast, somebody who can …
cross the line between thinking like a primary teacher and
thinking like a musician, [yes, yes] can draw those two things
together and provide a musical experience for children which is
grounded in the community of practice of a musician. But
equally, attends to the school kind of processes.
This ‘duality’ is echoed in the other two interviews:

The teacher is also an active musician, not just a dry person

who stands and watches and directs … (interview 1)

… part of [the teacher] being a musician is practising your

music. (interview 2)
 
… I will say to the trainee sometimes ‘Tell me what you did in
that lesson that a geography teacher couldn’t do? Or an art
teacher? Or a PE teacher?’ Because sometimes the lessons are
not musical. They are…. they’re too….. too unmusical!
(interview 2)
 conclusions

1.What my interviews do not show is an easy, consistent way of

articulating what underpins effective primary music teaching. There
also seems to be a wide variation in conceptualisations of what we
are doing.

2.Emerging from all three interviews is the idea that any teacher who
wishes to teach musically should also to ‘be a musician’ at some
level, with direct experience of ‘how musicians operate’.
 discussion

As someone in the same professional occupation as my

interviewees, I am both well-placed and badly-placed to properly
hear them (Schostak, 2006).
Others may well see different themes in the interview material,
having different perspectives (Braun and Clarke, 2013).
 implications

1. look for ways to help student teachers ‘feel like musicians’

2. explore the pedagogies of other subjects in the quest to make
primary music pedagogy – Shulmans’ (1987) ‘pedagogic content
knowledge’ – more explicit
3. continue to work musically with students but incorporate clearer
discussions about why this is so important and how it can be
achieved – students need both experience and reflection
4. continue the discussions with other primary music teacher-educators
to move towards a better-established pedagogy in this field
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