No description available.

As part of their musical training, young musicians are often entered for practical music examinations. Many are anxious about performing in front of an examiner, sometimes to the extent that they do not perform to the best of their ability, which can result in a lower mark than anticipated. The present research was designed to explore Music Performance Anxiety (MPA) and possible interrelationships among gender, practice, self- esteem, music self-efficacy, perceived criticism (from family), music negative perfectionism, and performance (marks attained). Overall the thesis comprises of three studies. All employed quantitative research methods throughout. Study 1 included 194 participants and was designed to develop a new measure of Musical Performance Anxiety for young musicians. Principal component analyses revealed two components. The first component had 20 items and appeared to measure cognitive/somatic sensations. It was shortened to a 13 item scale (MPAI-C) to ensure that the measure was not too long for the young participants in this study. The new measure showed satisfactory reliability and provided evidence of good convergent and divergent validity with other measures employed in the study. The second component was labelled 'Negative Affect' (NA) and comprised of 9 items. Study 2 was designed to develop a new Music Perfectionism measure. Data from 186 participants were analysed. Principal component analyses identified three components. The first component had 10 items and appeared to measure "negative perfectionism". The second component had 6 items and appeared to measure "teacher pressure". The third component had 6 items and appeared to measure "parental pressure". The negative perfectionism subscale (MPI-C) showed a satisfactory reliability and provided evidence of good convergent and divergent validity. The purpose of study 3 was to test a proposed model of MPA and possible interrelationships between music negative perfectionism, perceived criticism (from family), music self-efficacy, self-esteem, practice, gender and performance. A revised model was established using path analyses with Mplus software. The data from 304 participants indicated that males were more affected by perceived criticism from family and did more practise than females. Practice and music self-efficacy revealed a positive direct association with performance, while MPA showed a negative direct association with performance. A direct positive relationship was found between music negative perfectionism and MPA, while a negative relationship was shown between music negative perfectionism and self-esteem. A positive association was found between self-esteem and music self-efficacy, which in turn had a direct negative association with MP A. The final model provided an insight into the effects of MPA and the associations between other factors in relation to performance in young musicians in practical music exams. The findings from the present study have implications for students, parents, music teacher training, and future policies regarding curriculum development within music education worldwide.

This thesis interrogates the new music technology and its relationship to creativity, musicality and learning in the Key Stage 31 curriculum. In doing so it considers the effectiveness of the technology, what value pupils and teachers might place on technologically mediated musical interactions and how this relates to the principles enshrined in the National Curriculum. The research also explores the views of teachers in relation to the nature of creativity and learning in the music curriculum and their role in promoting it. The research was carried out across five sites: a PGCE music course, a year 7, year 8, and year 9 Key Stage 3 music classroom, and a panel of secondary music teachers. It was located in a qualitative paradigm which made use of observational and interview techniques. The research also probed the pupils' creative outcomes through detailed analysis. The findings suggest that the new technology can afford creative musical engagement through the manipulation of ready-made musical materials. It also suggests that pupils engage in a range of musical learning through such interactions and that they value the processes and outcomes. By way of contrast, teachers are still unclear about how to value such musical actions and are in the process of re conceptualising the learning that emerges in technologically mediated settings. Moreover, confusions still exist in relation to creativity and learning in the music classroom. This is compounded by the fact that the pupils' musical actions in relation to the new technology do not meet certain core practices and principles enshrined in the National Curriculum for music. This is problematic for, as the research suggests, such core practices often exclude or distance those pupils who are non-performing musicians. Hence the thesis concludes by positing that music education must consider a broader view of what it is to be musical. In doing so it needs to remix the music curriculum to take account of a range of musical actions. This remix should accommodate the new technology, reconfigure musical creativity and learning in the light of the technology and find new ways to value pupils' actions. In such settings the role of the teacher in shaping and supporting the pupils' musical actions will be an important consideration.

No description available.

Paulo Freire's (1970/2005) humanizing, critical and liberating pedagogy has been the inspiration for my praxis as a music teacher-educator. Taking the form of a self-study-action-research-curriculum-development project, a module based on Lucy Green's (2008) informal music learning model was developed on a mixed-mode Distance Education programme within the Open University of Brazil/Universidade de Brasilia. The module was implemented three times, involving 20 Tutors and 73 Student Teachers, across a period of two years. It combined elements of face-to-face and distance learning and teaching, using the Internet and other educational technology, and culminated in Student Teachers' practice in school classrooms. Technology was embedded in the module and is explored here as a means of promoting interaction and enabling activities to be carried out and supervised at a distance. My choices of technologies reflected values based on collaboration, learner-centredness and the empowerment of users, aiming at promoting a dialogical and problem-posing education such as that advocated by Freire in order to achieve conscientization. In addition, my analysis sheds light on some of the ways in which the technology was shaped by its users' needs and, thus, some of the reasons why discourses of technological determinism need to be reviewed. As I investigated my praxis, I observed how my actions reflected on my Student Teachers' musical and teaching practices. From this, I developed a theoretical model, which involved interpreting their teaching as the mobilization of three domains: their practical musicianship, their use of authority, and their relationship with learners' musical worlds. This thesis suggests that a potentially 'liberating education' can be lived when music teachers mobilize those three domains whilst teaching. Although that theoretical model emerged from practices based on informal learning in music, they may also be found in other teaching practices in music, and, therefore, applied in other music teaching contexts.

No description available.

This thesis seeks to examine the nature of pedagogic discourse in Music and its relationship to pupils' inclinations to persevere with it as a subject after Key Stage 3. An ethnographic case-study was conducted in one South Wales secondary school, referred to as Aberquaver High School, focusing on one class of Year 9 pupils, 9C, and their music teacher, Mrs- Metronome. It reflects my experience of entering the study as a music professional and teacher educator and leaving it with a commitment to the necessity to work from appropriate theory, in this case that of Bernstein and, subsidiarilly, Bourdieu, through adequate empirical means. In seeking to understand 9C pupils' intentions to carry on with Music at Key Stage 4, a conceptual apparatus was required with reach that carried from consideration of how knowledge and policy in the primary context originates and was shaped or recontextualised through a variety of offìcial and pedagogic agencies so that it became the text, in this case the programme of study that constitutes Key Stage 3 National Curriculum Music, from which schools and teachers, including Aberquaver and Mrs Metronome, read. Specifically, this study attempts to 'stretch' the boundary between recontextualisation and reproduction, suggesting that there is no sharp line between those who shape subjects and deliver them. Mrs Metronome allowed, as teachers are by schools in our system, to impose her own judgements on her small department's work, brought a professional dynamic to its pedagogy that could not simply be 'read' from officially required Music in Wales. A product of Western Art Music tradition and teacher education, she valued other musics. Constrained by school organisational imperatives, themselves upshots of National Curriculum and assessment requirements, particularly as to time, her long service, personal acumen and subject success had allowed her to accumulate relative resource riches in terms of instruments and ICT facilities- These were the basis for her characteristic rejigging of more conventional group based classroom music, coupled with the ability and desire to imbue each pupil with instrumental skills in a pedagogy strongly centred on music performance and its evaluation. Such an approach still appeared to have differential gender and social class effects in a prevailing peer and wider cultural climate of popular and other non classical musical forms. Despite the variety of musical genres included in her curriculum and her department's resource wealth, for some pupils, particularly boys, it was not sufficiently 'real music', especially for those denied access to 'real' instruments. Though most young people avow the importance of music to their lives, in a prevailing climate of the 'usefulness' and vocational sígnificance of school subjects, its choice as a Key Stage 4 subject, here and elsewhere, tend to be further constrained by the limits of school option choice systems. Nonetheless, Music at Aberquaver still managed to engage disproportionate numbers across the ability range at GCSE in comparíson with other Welsh secondaries and achieve good standards. It is argued that these were a function of Mrs Metronome's recontextualised pedagogic discourse and practice. Policy is a complex series of events and understandings in need of theoretical elaboration rather than evaluation tinged, evidence base that is about rather than for policy change and implementation. The study contains messages for teaching colleagues, school administrators, teacher educators and other conventionally defined offìcial and pedagogic recontextualisers, as well as national policy makers, about what makes better Music that more pupils wish to persevere with for longer. Further research is, however, required to extend the scope of the present study and examine the transferability of the findings to other locations.

In recent times there has been a resurgence of interest in the history of music education, which has opened up new opportunities for the re-interpretation of both established and changing philosophies, pedagogies and practices. Historical research into music services within LEAs is still a fertile area for investigation. This thesis brings new arguments and evidence to bear upon an under-researched and emerging area of study. The focus of this particular investigation emerged from the author’s earlier research into the history of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) music service, the findings of which revealed three interrelated factors underpinning its development: funding and commitment, strong leadership, and the ‘London’ factor. These earlier research findings prompted further questions leading to the conception of the rationale and focus for this thesis. The first was to ask if government reports, and the ensuing initiatives they fuelled, had led to other LEAs developing their approaches to state music education in similar or parallel ways and at similar rates, and the second was to examine the role that individuals played in steering the direction of music education within the different authorities. Empirical research has provided an overview of the developments in England within three separate demographically contrasting LEAs: Leicestershire, London and Manchester, which in turn represent a large rural county, the capital city, and a relatively large northern industrial city. During the period of the chosen time frame of this study the LEAs, and those appointed to lead them, were at their most powerful and influential, but, from the mid-1970s onwards, their autonomy gradually declined as education became more centralised through government intervention, resulting in loss of power and the consequent sidelining of their role, a situation which impacted significantly on state provision for music. This thesis examines the consequences of the effects of decision making, by organisations, and their individual interpretation, on music education thinking and practice.

This thesis arose from a concern with assessment in Brazilian higher education music courses, especially in the assessment of ability in aural training classes. A review of literature indicates that musical ability is assessed mainly by an emphasis on the technical and analytical aspects of music. The thrust of this study is that individuals are aware of and value other aspects of music, besides its technicalities, and a comprehensive listening test ought to take this into consideration. The research has two interconnected strands. The first is a theoretical model of categories of musical response derived from aspects of the work of L. B. Meyer (1967) and Swanwick's layers of musical understanding (1988). The second is empirical work drawing on data from two groups of participants - seven contemporary Brazilian composers and forty undergraduate students on a music course and on other courses at a Brazilian university. The empirical work investigates: a) general attitudes of composers and students to music and their correspondence with the categories of the model; and, b) the responses of students to specific musical pieces and whether these fit the categories. The final aim is to explore the implications of the research findings for the assessment of musical listening with particular reference to Brazilian higher education. Analysis of the data revealed that there is a correspondence between Meyer's scheme and the general attitudes to music of composers and students. However, this scheme alone is inadequate to interpret the complexity of actual musical experience; Swanwick's layers provided more useful guidelines. Regarding the musical responses of students, six categories were found. The presence of these categories confirms the relative narrowness of conventional listening tests. The implications for Brazilian higher education include the possibility of developing objective and valid criteria to assess musical listening.

This study explores Kosovan teachers’ identities, beliefs, self-reported practices and perceived needs, concerning the interface of music, society and education. It does this at a time when the newly independent country is emerging from war and establishing an education system, of which music forms an important part. The discussion takes a social constructivist viewpoint, whereby music learning and teaching are understood in relation to the historical, political and cultural contexts of the society in which they occur. The focus of the investigation is on the current practical and theoretical situation faced by music education in Kosovo. This is approached through the voices of music teachers, all of whom belong to the Albanian-majority ethnic group in Kosovo (92%), which was subject to political oppression and acculturation under the former Serb regime until the Kosovan war ended in 1999. Using an ‘explanatory mixed methods design’ (Creswell, 2003, p. 15) a questionnaire survey was conducted with 204 teachers falling into two main, very different, groups – generalists and specialists – across all regions of Kosovo. The survey was followed up with semi-structured interviews of 16 individuals, selected as representative of each of the two main groups. The study investigated issues within and across each group, concerning: i) the teachers’ musical identities in relation to Kosovan history, culture and Albanian ethnicity; ii) their beliefs about the role of music and music education in Kosovan society; iii) their self-reported music teaching practices and iv) their perceived needs and opportunities for professional development. Similarities and differences between the two groups were found to be of potential importance in the future development of music education. In addition, the findings reveal serious challenges faced by Kosovan music teachers, who find themselves trapped between traditional musical values, styles and practices on one hand, and modern, Western music ideologies present in the newly developing music curriculum. Finally, the thesis offers some concrete recommendations to the relevant institutions in Kosovo, aimed at furthering and supporting the development of the new music curriculum.