Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemIntroducing instrumental students to improvisation( 2012)Improvisation has been an integral component of music practice throughout a variety of world musics, such as the Indonesian Gamelan, Japanese Kabuki Theatre, African drumming, Australian Indigenous music, Klezmer music, the Indian Raga, Jazz and Popular music. Instrumental tuition, within the present system of Western Education, on the other hand, tends to emphasise an early and ongoing commitment to the reading of notated music. Some of the literature in the area suggests that the emphasis for instrumental tuition should be concerned with improvisation thus producing opportunities to achieve a more personalised and independent result with music expression. By including improvisation within regular tuition the student instrumentalist could feel more at one with his or her own voice and imagination, rather than attempting to take on the role of reproducing the character and style of another person's notation. This thesis focussed on the development and provision of improvised music activities with high school students from Years 10 and 11. Consideration was given to how these improvised music activities might have impacted not only their improvisational skills but also broader attitudes to music. The study included a specifically designed curriculum emphasising improvisational techniques. It was constructed and implemented over a ten-week period with accompanying interviews, questionnaire and video. The aim of the study was to assess the impact of the implementation of this curriculum and how it could assist the learning and teaching of improvisation. The study's performance-ensemble consisted of rhythm and lead instrumentalists where all participants had the opportunity to engage with specific instrumental techniques that assisted the expression of improvisation. Simultaneously, all participants had the liberty of managing the lesson-content with original extemporised melody and composition. The results showed the participants experienced increased confidence with improvisation. The conclusion suggests that improvisation be viewed as an integral component within the teaching and learning of instrumental music.
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ItemCultural perspectives, thinking, educators and globalisation: a critical analysis of the Future Problem Solving Program( 2012)Globalisation in its modern phase has inevitably included a strong educational element, in which learning programs that originate in one part of the world have been transported to another. In concordance with economic trends in the contemporary era, this export trade has been primarily one-way. Curricula that have been devised in the industrialised societies of more ‘developed’ States - the so-called ‘West’ – have been introduced into regions that have very different cultural, socio-economic and educational characteristics and traditions. Contemporary models of teaching higher order thinking as a discrete curriculum focus have been part of this movement, particularly since the notion of thinking skills came to be perceived as central to an advanced school education since at least the 1970s. As a result, while a number of thinking skills programs have been developed in educational systems within economically advanced countries, Future Problem Solving (FPS) Program International remains one of the few that has adopted a deliberate line of internationalism, moving into regions beyond its initial base of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, such as Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa, with varying degrees of success. However, as with similar learning programs, the Future Problem Solving Program has been introduced into new territories on the premise that the notion of thinking does not vary across cultures, and that, regardless of the socio-economic and cultural background of the new FPS region, this form of educational transference is both possible and inevitably successful. This research project investigated the validity of transplanting thinking skills programs from one system to another on an international scale by focusing on a trinity of concepts that delineates the centre of this conundrum: culture, thinking and international education. The Future Problem Solving Program, along with the specific thinking skills on which it is instituted, provided the context of the investigation, which employed a comparative analysis of educators in the multicultural societies of Malaysia and South Africa, with a view to establishing the degree to which cultural background determined how thinking skills are conceived and enacted by educators. Using a grounded theory perspective, the findings of the project were threefold: first, that, different cultures do tend to conceptualise elements of thinking in different ways; that a converging spectrum of cultural dispositions towards thinking can be identified; and that those whose cultural dispositions of thinking are more towards the middle of the convergence, where a balance across cultural dispositions is more in evidence, tend to be those who are either more exposed to cultures outside their country of origin, or who are more inclined to support the cultural transformation of a society in the name of social, or national, stability. The implications of these findings for globalisation of thinking skills initiatives such as the Future Problem Solving Program are significant, for they suggest that such thinking skills programs need to be reworked to meet the pattern of cultural dispositions of thinking that exist within a particular region if they are to be successfully instituted in different places as part of a conscious program of international growth.
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ItemThinking about historical thinking in the Australian Curriculum: History( 2012)This study analyses and evaluates the approach to historical thinking in the Australian Curriculum: History. This research study adopts interpretative discipline based pedagogy, with a document content analysis method. The study draws upon the research of Peter Lee (1983) on historical substantive and procedural concepts which have influenced the models of historical thinking by Wineburg (2000), Seixas (2006), Lévesque (2008) and historical reasoning by Van Drie and Van Boxtel (2008). These models provide a theoretical frame to critically evaluate the relationship and application of the disciplinary structures in the Australian Curriculum: History. Historical methods and procedures engage students in the process of historical construction through active historical thinking and reasoning. Research judgments are made on the effectiveness of the curriculum and its design in understanding and communicating the relationship between the substantive and procedural concepts of history as a discipline. The research findings indicate that the curriculum fails to recognize the importance and distinctiveness of substantive concepts as the building blocks of historical knowledge that make historical inquiry meaningful and intelligible. The analysis of substantive concepts in the Australian Curriculum: History using unique, organizational and thematic concepts reflects a curriculum that does not always pay attention to historical context. The study revealed that the curriculum fails to make explicit the interrelationship between substantive and procedural concepts in the Historical Knowledge and Understanding strand and the Historical Skills strand. This has resulted in a curriculum that does not enact the analytical and evaluative nature of procedural concepts such as historical significance, continuity and change, etc. Also, there is limited understanding of the method of application of procedural concepts like historical perspectives, contestability and empathy in the curriculum and as a result this undermines the role of these concepts in facilitating historical thinking. From this analysis a new pedagogical model, “Framework for Historical Reasoning” emerges which relates the historical substantive and procedural concepts and historical skills as a unified pedagogical approach. This model provides a framework which teachers can use to engage with the enacted curriculum and facilitate student historical inquiry and understanding.