Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This research examines the usefulness of the Curriculum and Standards Framework as the basis for school music education in Victoria. The thesis consists of a folio of four short research tasks and a Dissertation that examine the question in different ways. The first of the short research tasks uses document and discourse analysis to examine and critique the philosophies of music education and aesthetic education that inform the Curriculum and Standards Framework. The same techniques are used in the second research task to trace the adoption and dissemination of the philosophy of music education as aesthetic education in a range of curriculum documents from around Australia. These two tasks show how centralised curriculum development often produces abstract and impractical goals and strategies. Research tasks three and four use interview and participant observation with teachers based in one Melbourne secondary school to illuminate the highly contextual nature of teaching practice. The theoretical formulations of learning presented in Victorian curriculum materials and policy documents is contrasted with the practical approaches that teachers take in developing educational programmes. These tasks show how school education is always developed in relation to students and resources and not according to abstract standards. The Dissertation reports on a major research project with thirty-two experienced music teachers working in the northern metropolitan region of Melbourne. Interviews with both primary and secondary teachers sought to determine the extent to which the Curriculum and Standards Framework had impacted upon their classroom teaching practice. The research was guided by Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) principles and it showed that the Framework and the associated process of centralising curriculum production failed to deliver any measurable gains or changes in music education in schools.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This thesis examines public school music in the making of a modern middle class in late-Victorian Toronto. Its aim is to show how this subject both shaped and was shaped by the culture of modernity which increasingly pervaded large urban centres such as Toronto during the course of the nineteenth century. In so doing, this study also examines various aspects of the acoustic soundtrack during the period under study—particularly that which witnessed the advent of industrialization—to bring additional context and perspective to the discussion. Using an approach which goes beyond pedagogic and bureaucratic justification, the overall intent is to present the evolution of school music and its public performance within a much broader acoustic framework, that is, to weave it into the increasingly-urban soundtrack of Toronto, to gain some appreciation of how it would have been heard and understood at the time. In addition to its primary historical discourse, the study also draws meaning and context from a variety of other academic disciplines (musicology, sociology and education, to name but a few). Because of this, it necessarily moves from the general to the specific in terms of its overall focus, not only to provide background, but also to help make sense of the ways in which each of these areas informed and influenced the development of Toronto’s public school system and the inclusion of music in its classrooms. It then proceeds more or less chronologically through the nineteenth century, placing particular emphasis upon the careers of prominent educators such as Egerton Ryerson and James L. Hughes, to mark significant shifts in context and philosophy. Within each, a thematic approach has been employed to highlight relevant developments that likewise informed the way in which school music was conceived and comprehended. In this way, it is hoped that a fresh perspective will emerge on the history of public school music in Toronto, and prompt further research that employs aural history as a more prominent tool of historical research.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 21, 2010). Advisor: Jay Dorfman. Keywords: Assessment; instrumental music. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-112).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 28, 2010). Directed by Constance McKoy; submitted to the School of Music. Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-99).

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 25, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Wendy L. Sims. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.