Faculty of Education - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemTertiary music education and musicians' careers( 2018)Australian tertiary institutions offer many courses for musicians intent on working in the music industry. There has been, however, limited research into how these courses from different providers contribute to musicians’ careers. The rationale for conducting this research was to provide insights to educators on how they might design courses to meet better the needs of musicians preparing to work in the music industry. A review of the literature highlighted the concerns of educators and academics about the balance in curriculum emphasis between musical expertise and industry practice. This study examined the merits of different pedagogical paradigms through the experiences of graduates from different tertiary music offerings. Using a mixed methods approach and a descriptive, interpretive research design, this study explored the experience of tertiary music graduates and how their learning contributed to establishing their music careers. Data were analysed around three themes, (1) the characteristics of music portfolio careers, (2) tertiary music education experiences and graduate outcomes, and (3) the ongoing professional development needs of musicians for sustaining a music career. The findings demonstrate the formidable challenges of working in a music portfolio career including the self- management of a career in a precarious employment market. Such careers required a mix of work realms such as music practice, teaching and entrepreneurial activities to generate new work. Consequently, career trajectories were found to be necessarily circuitous and “messy” but there is evidence that tertiary music education is a significant intervention in the continuum of learning for a musician’s career. It is argued that there are five broad categories of proficiencies that are required first to establish and then sustain a music career. The pedagogies and course emphases from different tertiary music providers in the Australian state of Victoria contributed in different ways towards musicians’ careers. Furthermore, there were some shortcomings in requisite proficiencies which suggest the potential for further curricular development. This potential lay in both undergraduate courses to better prepare musicians for starting out in their careers, and post-graduate courses to provide further development for the sustainability of musicians’ careers.
-
ItemBlending learning and technology: degree studies at vocational training college as a case in point( 2017)Blended learning is commonly defined as teaching and learning that combines digitally mediated and face-to-face activity. While the infusion and growth of digital technology into classrooms and beyond is said to have had the effect of transforming educational practices, educators talk of the unease that is experienced between what ‘should be’ and what ‘is’ when using educational technology in practice (Selwyn, 2014). There is a need for studies that challenge the qualities reified in discussions on educational technology such as ‘affordance’, ‘open’, or ‘ubiquitous’ and that articulate the lived reality of blended learning. Using actor-network theory, a materialist approach firmly based upon observation of actual events, this study explores blended learning as a sociomaterial practice in a higher education setting within an undergraduate business communications course. Departing from thinking about technology as a discrete artifact (Scott & Orlikowski, 2014), the study demonstrates the significance of material agency in the everyday practices of blended learning. Rather than a nexus of online and embodied activity, or a dualism of human/tool, the study extends the common understanding of blended learning by arguing that it does not exist outside of the relations that produce it. Viewed relationally, blended learning is an emergent practice, constituted by human-material co-agents (Michael, 2000). In the case under study, it presents as a heterogeneous assemblage of bytes, buildings, talk, smart ‘phones, learning systems and notes, among other materialities. Towards achieving a detailed tracing of the everyday practices of students when engaged in blended learning, the empirical material collected for the study involved learning management system log data, student discussion texts, classroom activity sketches, images of campus common areas and individual interviews. Technology was found to play a constitutive rather than a mediating role, producing blended learning as an effect. By using a concrete example of achieving the blend in blended learning, the chief contribution of this study lies in offering a more than constructivist approach that dismantles the notion of blended learning holding together as a discrete entity, realised through human agency alone. Practitioners of blended learning could, with profit, reflect on how spatial, digital and embodied learning encounters are performed through diverse sociomaterial practices. Further, blended learning designs that allow for the hybridity of practices will provide improved opportunities for students to learn in both embodied and digital encounters on-campus and online.