Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Research Seminar Announcement

Music Education Special Interest Group

 

Research Seminar Announcement

 


The private world of public master classes: instrumental sub-cultures and gendered perspectives on excellence

 

Dr. Marion Long

 

 

Date: 17th October 2011

 

Time: 12.30 – 1.30

 

Room: 784

 

Further details from Lucy Green, l.green@ioe.ac.uk

 

All are welcome

 

 

Abstract

 

Public master classes provide students with an opportunity to both perform in front of colleagues, teachers and the public and to receive feedback on their performance from a master musician, selected for their musical expertise in a particular musical repertoire. The master musician is perceived to possess an exceptional blend of musical knowledge derived from firstly a distinguished musical career as a high profile performer and secondly in most but not all instances, a rigorous training in the values and methods of a particular musical tradition.

 

Recent research by Hanken (2008) has identified that master classes are relatively complex forms of learning in which the traditional master-apprentice pedagogic model expands to incorporate an audience. The presence of the audience of colleagues, faculty teachers and the public creates a particularly pressurised learning environment which tests an individual student's ability to perform convincingly. This audience can be described as 'informed' because it typically brings to this arena a shared awareness of the conventions of the musical style, and a specialised knowledge of a particular musical instrument or voice. The master musician judges the performance and provides positive, constructive or negative feedback, reflecting an expectation that the student will strive to master and to transcend the structural formalities and stylistic conventions relevant to the music that they have performed. 

 

A team of researchers from the Institute of Education and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama have investigated 373 conservatoire students' experiences and perceptions of various types of master class, collected in a questionnaire and analysed using quantitative and qualitative approaches. Students' performing experiences of public master classes were found to differ significantly according to their principal instrument of study. Further differences involving students' experiences as members of the audience reflected combined factors of principal instrument of study, gender and year at college. In particular these findings indicated that perspective taking on the concept of musical excellence was articulated through gender. A discussion of these findings will examine firstly, the extent to which students' performing and listening experiences and perceptions of public master classes were to some extent predetermined by intrinsically exclusive or inclusive attitudes towards music and secondly, the implications for the reproduction of musical sub-cultures and gendered perspectives on excellence in schools as music students take up positions as instrumental music teachers.

 

MARION LONG completed her PhD in Psychology of Education at the Institute of Education University of London, UK. Her PhD examined the effect of a music intervention on the temporal organisation of children's reading behaviour. She is involved in several research studies across a range of topics.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Call for papers: SPECIAL ISSUE Journal of Music, Technology and Education

Journal of Music, Technology and Education

Special Issue

An examination of affordances of the application of 'open source' to music education.

Guest Editors: Ketil Thorgersen (Sweden)  Lauri Väkevä (Finland) , Mikko Myllykoski (Finland) Steve Dillon (Australia), Alex Ruthmann (USA)

Call for papers

Brief description

This special issue of JMTE (http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=152/) will examine the affordances of the application of 'open source' to music education. Each article will focus on one particular aspect and context.

The publication of this special issue follows on from an international symposium presentation at the Research in Music Education conference in Exeter in the UK in April 2011. The symposium revealed significant aspects of the need to apply development of philosophy and practice around the concept of open source in music classrooms.

 

Proposals

Music practitioners and researchers are invited to contribute research articles (6,000 words) or project reports (3,000-4,000 words) that look beyond open source a set of licenses and to consider the ideas and ideals that constitute what can be considered the open source movement and possible implications for music education research. What is it that makes masses of people spend their skills and time to produce software for free, which anyone can make use of and continue to develop freely and what constitutes such a generative society? The aim is for articles to elaborate on this from philosophical, pedagogical and practical technical points of view in an open atmosphere where the hope is that knowledge will be generated collectively through the session in an open sourced mode.

 

Articles could address, but are not limited to the following questions that arise for music education:

 

1) How should music educators relate to different arguments for and against creative recycling in the digital music culture?

2) Is it possible to teach music taking seriously the argument for Music 3.0, and if it is, how can we support creativity full-scale in music education recognizing this possibility?

3) How can we offer versatile musical content and tasks with educational open source applications?

4) How to maintain people's individual rights to their own musical content in open shareable software environments?

5) Might "Music" be the original "open source" project? What might we gain or lose by looking toward technological models for music education?

6) What might be afforded by providing students with the tools to design and build theri own musical environments?

7) What are the relational pedagogies needed for this approach?

8) How can we apply the philosophy of 'open source' technology in music education?

 

A Prezi outline of the RIME symposium can be found at: http://prezi.com/cm0vnmiayfq-/open-source-and-music-education-rime-2011/

 

Proposals for research articles and project reports should be e-mailed to Ketil Thorgersen (Sweden)  Lauri Väkevä (Finland) , Mikko Myllykoski (Finland) Steve Dillon (Australia), Alex Ruthmann (USA)

no later than 31 October 2011, and include a 250- 500 word abstract, the title of the proposed article, a brief biography (200 words max), and the contact details of the author. Authors will be notified of the outcome of their proposals by the end of December 2011. If successful, the full articles would need to be submitted by the end of January 2012.

 

For more information, contact:

Dr Ketil Thorgersen ketil.thorgersen@utep.su.se

Dr Steve Dillon, Queensland University of Technology: sc.dillon@qut.edu.au

Dr Lauri Väkevä lauri.vakeva@siba.fi

Dr Alex Ruthmann alex.ruthmann@gmail.com

Dr Mikko Myllykoski mikko.myllykoski@campus.jyu.fi