<p> The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the essence of Winter Guard International (WGI) as lived by ten stakeholders, invested individuals currently serving in leadership roles within the percussion and winds divisions of the WGI organization. Through the lens of a social constructivist theoretical framework, and the use of individual interviews to obtain data, this study considered what participants have experienced and the contexts in which these experiences have taken place. Analysis of the data involved the identification of significant statements from participant interviews. These statements were grouped into four main themes that appeared to be common to all participants. The four themes were: 1) the Development of Character and Identity: Non-Musical Outcomes, 2) Achievement and Excellence, 3) WGI as Educational Entity, and 4) Competition. Additional subthemes were identified for two of the four main themes. Findings indicate that though participants in this study approached WGI from varying backgrounds and distinct personal contexts, their reported experiences with WGI are remarkably similar. Findings further indicate that these experiences resulted in an enthusiastic view of the organization&rsquo;s positive and life-changing influence on students as musicians, performers, and citizens. The implications for WGI&rsquo;s contribution to instrumental music education, and school band programs specifically, are discussed. Topics for future research are suggested.</p><p>

The purpose of this study was to describe practices of pre-school educators and to investigate the extent to which they enhance music instruction among five-to-six-year-old children. This was accomplished through an examination of three early childhood educators investigating what strategies are used for providing music instruction to pre-school children, the attitudes of teachers and parents in regard to this, the most effective approach for providing music instruction, and the assessments used to measure student progress in achieving musical skills. Primary participants included three early childhood teachers, and secondary participants included nine parents. Qualitative methods were used, including formal interviews with the three chosen teachers. They were each interviewed one time individually. Parents were given open-ended questionnaires designed by the researcher. Observations of teacher interactions with students were conducted in 14 separate sessions over a period of three weeks, where the researcher sat in during general and music class in the same classroom; the field notes cataloged observations of musical activities. The collected documents included teaching materials developed by the music and classroom teachers, such as lesson plans and a teaching activity handbook. The Taiwanese pre-school music curriculum included singing, music and movement, listening, and playing musical instruments. Data indicated that children can only audiate to one instrumental sound or one melodic line at a time. The teacher provided feedback was found to be effective in enhancing student musical learning. Teachers served as musical models in singing, music and movement, and in playing instruments to assist children's musical learning. Bruner's theory of enactive and iconic modes of representation played an important role in singing, music and movement, as well as listening in the class. The model movements or gestures were presented by the teachers and imitated by the children. Teachers and parents had positive attitudes toward early childhood music education. When music classes were provided, the music teacher could enhance both the classroom teacher and children's musical skills. Effective approaches were storytelling and using body movements. Participants reported several different opinions regarding teachers' assessment of students including having teachers follow the national curriculum standard, assess her students through their classroom response, and observe her students at a graduation concert. In general, the practitioners' strategies for enhancing pre-school music education were positive and related to previous research findings on music instruction and educational theories.

Race to the Top (RttP) was used to focus school reform on the improvement of teaching through teacher evaluation based on student growth data. Papay (2012) was among the researchers who argued that “evaluators must be well-trained, knowledgeable about effective teaching practices, as defined in the standards, and able to analyze observed practices to determine how well teachers are meeting those standards” (p.135). Hill and Grossman (2013) claimed that, in the current era of reform, content-area experts were the best means of supporting teachers and helping them improve their practice. In light of this assertion, music supervisors have vital expertise, yet they are seldom represented in the music education research literature. Craig’s framework of knowledge communities arising on the knowledge landscape was essential to this inquiry. I made the assumption that, because music supervisors interact consistently with teachers as well as other administrators, their knowledge landscapes are complex, and I wondered which knowledge communities shaped music supervisors’ professional practice, and also how their story constellations were shaped in the midst of education reform brought about by Race to the Top. Through narrative inquiry, I was able to depict the lives of myself and two other music supervisors. We recorded six conversations, and I created transcripts from those recordings. The participants and I engaged in co-construction of an interim text until each of us was satisfied that the transcriptions sufficiently illustrated the complexity of his or her temporality, sociality, and place. The final research text was represented in script form as ten scenes related to the themes we uncovered, and I subsequently interpreted those scenes. In our story constellations, reform stories were about trying to link evaluation of student growth to evaluation of teachers with no model to follow, while our stories of reform were about moving to a system where multiple sources of evidence were brought to bear in teacher evaluation. Our reform stories expressed fears that lack of validity in student growth assessments would eventually dishearten teachers, but in stories of reform, we expressed that teachers should be deeply engaged in considering how their students’ growth was best demonstrated.

Thesis (M.M.)--Boston University

Public music education in the United States, including secondary wind band ensembles, has experienced a decades-long enrollment decline (Dembowski, Gay, & Owings, 1979; Elpus & Abril, 2011; Hartley, 1996, 1991; Hoffer, 1980; Music for All Foundation, 2004; Stewart, 1991; von Zastrow & Janc, 2004; Woodworth et al., 2007). Research has shown that students feel more ownership, membership, and attachment to an organization when it speaks to their values (Furrer & Skinner, 2003; Hurley, 1992, 1995; Mitra, 2003, 2004; Rudduck et al., 2003; Rudduck & Flutter 2000, 2004; Williams, 2011). With a more concerted effort by music educators to integrate student values, this enrollment trend could be stemmed. The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare student values of music education with those of their teachers. I adopted the subjectivist viewpoint of value theory, positioned in the field of psychology, for the theoretical framework. From this perspective, values are guiding principles of a person that are revealed through evaluation. This was paired with Q methodology, which allowed participants’ subjective values to be accessed through a sorting activity. Data collection took place in two phases. First, values were identified through open-ended questions posed to 3 teachers and 188 students in wind band ensembles at three randomly selected public secondary schools in Chester County, PA. These statements formed the Q-set, which, during the second phase, the directors and 12 randomly selected students, four at each site, sorted into a unimodal distribution framework. The Q-set was organized into seven categories and the data from the Q-sort were used to calculate various means to compare student and teacher responses as well as to calculate correlation coefficients. These data, combined with background information and post-sort interview responses, revealed that students and their teachers held different values for music education at each individual site as well as collectively.

In this qualitative case study, I sought to examine the reasons for the extensive time, monetary, and personal commitment to performing advanced repertoire made by the membership of a local instrumental ensemble, for which I will use the pseudonym, Large Midwest Community Band (LMCB). Two research questions guided this study: 1) Which prior experiences in public school bands, if any, contributed to the participants’ desires to continue performing music at an advanced level, and 2) Why did they continue to commit to spending their leisure time by performing music at an advanced level of music? Members of the LMCB participated in interviews designed to investigate these two questions. All volunteers were regular members of the LMCB, who willingly and routinely contributed time, effort, and talent to the group. Participants answered questions regarding their various experiences with the LMCB, such as those about the rewards they gained from playing in the band, the influences that kept them returning to the group, and the time commitment necessary to be a productive member. The interview responses were transcribed and reviewed for errors and omissions, then coded. The affective method of value coding was used in order to code both the actual language of the participants and their personal attitudes and beliefs. Codes repeated by several interview subjects led to the development of themes around playing music and participating in the LMCB. The themes identified in the data were applicable to the theoretical framework of the Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) proposed initially by Robert A. Stebbins (1977). Stebbins’s (1977) six professional amateur attributes provided the lens through which many of the qualities and traits of musical amateurism were identified in the LMCB participants. The majority of participants cited public school band experience as the launching point for future music participation. School bands provided the basic training and skills needed for successful participation in ensembles, the impetus for students to participate in college or community bands post-high school, an important social function, a family-like atmosphere, and a support system for many. The motivations behind the participants’ continued engagement at amateur levels in the LMCB emerged through the lens of SLP. Unstandardized performances, high levels of musicianship, social and musical identities, and community pride and outreach widely contributed to the continuance of advanced levels of music making within the ensemble. Based on the results of this particular study, music educators should view themselves as both the progenitors and the long-term caretakers of the art form of community instrumental music.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

<p> The purpose of this comparative phenomenological study was to investigate whether code-switching happened among music educators and if so, whether they used code-switching in their teaching. The secondary purpose of the study was to learn how music educators with varied musical experiences differentiated and / or code-switched between settings, if at all. As there was little existent literature in the area of code-switching and musicians, it was hoped this study would fill a gap in the literature about music educators and code-switching. </p><p> This dissertation employed qualitative methodology including comparative phenomenology. The goal was to understand the lived experiences of the five participants as they reflected on their experiences code-switching. The data consisted primarily of in-depth interviews and analysis using NVIVO&trade; coding software to develop in vivo data, sub-themes and themes. Thick description, identifying research bias, and member checks were used to establish trustworthiness. </p><p> Five themes emerged: Teacher identity as code-switching, early exposure to oral learning and notation affects code-switching, professional &ldquo;gigging&rdquo; as code-switching, musical instruments as code-switching and finally, code-switching and 21^st century learning and teaching. Recommendations were provided for educators and future research.</p><p>

<p> Critical topics of teaching music continue to undergo philosophical evolution as unique concepts and perspectives are introduced by a variety of experts both in and out of the field. One concern among many is the role of the secondary music educator in the ideal classroom for student learning, part of which is impacted by teacher-student rapport. Teacher-student rapport is defined in this paper by the author as an adaptation of the general definition of rapport by Carey et al. (1986a): the quality of relationship between teacher and student that is characterized by communication and mutual, emotional understanding. The following questions were explored through content analysis of an education practitioner journal as well as literary analysis: how are teacher-student rapport-building strategies informed by the behaviorist, cognitivist, constructivist, and humanist schools of psychology; how can the information garnered from a literary analysis guide the transformation of teacher disposition policy; what are best practice techniques for teachers to build rapport in the secondary instrumental ensemble as implied by the data? It is with the data and discussion of this study that the author hopes to support teachers&rsquo; positive rapport-building efforts with students in the secondary instrumental classroom through the avenues of immediate classroom application, and policy transformation.</p><p> Data reveals that articles in the <i>Journal of Educational Psychology </i> examining positive rapport-building elements most comprehensively cite principles of the constructivist school, and the top three cited psychologists are Albert Bandura, Abraham Maslow, and Jean Piaget. Recommendations for teacher disposition policy transformation are suggested to help preservice teachers cultivate positive rapport-building practice, and they include standards for promoting socio-cultural investment, positive expression, student discourse recognition, reflective practice, empathy, and effective communication. Examples of potential applications in the secondary instrumental music classroom include, but are not limited to, engaging in students&rsquo; referential (Reimer, 2010) connections to rehearsed repertoire and permitting exploration of expressive interpretation of said connections; consistently raising standards of musicianship and community in response to achievement through promotion of reflective processes and demonstrations of exemplary performance; recognizing and utilizing students&rsquo; abilities to think critically and abstractly about the expression and artistic merit of class repertoire. Other implications of best practice are refined from Bandura&rsquo;s (1986) self-efficacy, Maslow&rsquo;s (1943 &amp; 1971) hierarchy of needs, and Piaget&rsquo;s (1952) schema and genetic epistemology theories. Finally, potential operations in chamber music are presented in relation to constructivist principles.</p><p>

The purpose of this study was to determine which of the two methods is more appropriate to teach pitch discrimination to Grade 6 choral students to improve sight-singing note accuracy. This study consisted of three phases: pre-testing, instruction and post-testing. During the four week study, the experimental group received training using the Kodaly method while the control group received training using the traditional method. The pre and post tests were evaluated by three trained musicians. The analysis of the data utilized an independent t-test and a paired t-test with the methods of teaching (experimental and control) as a factor. Quantitative results suggest that the experimental subjects, those receiving Kodaly instruction at post-treatment showed a significant improvement in the pitch accuracy than the control group. The specific change resulted in the Kodaly method to be more effective in producing accurate pitch in sight-singing.