Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableA survey of parent's use of music in the home with their child with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for building the capacity of families(GAMUT - Grieg Academy Music Therapy Research Centre (NORCE & University of Bergen), 2014)Preschool aged children with disabilities including Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) typically receive early childhood intervention services that adopt a family-centred approach to supporting child and family outcomes. Family-centred approaches aim to build the capacity of parents to support their child’s development immediately and into the future, and therefore offer parents a variety of resources. One indication of whether these resources have been relevant and useful to the family is to consider how well they have been incorporated into everyday life. This study surveyed 11 families of children with ASD aged 3- 6 years who were receiving music therapy as part of a broader study, and asked them to keep a journal of their use of the music experiences modelled within the sessions during their typical week. It is the first study to ask parents of children with ASD to quantify the time spent in music experiences. Results showed that families can and do use music to engage with their child with ASD, with a total median time of 2.8 hours per week recorded. The total average time comprised four categories of music experiences, including singing, singing and playing instruments, improvising with instruments, and listening to music. Of these, singing and listening to music were the most popular (37% each of the total time) and were best maintained at follow up. These results provide preliminary support demonstrating that music therapy could be a successful way to support capacity building in families by encouraging them to embed therapeutic music experiences into their daily life. Further and more detailed research is needed to investigate this central tenet of family-centred practice, particularly in regards to how families’ use of music experiences change over time.
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ItemONLINE MUSIC EDUCATION STREAM INTRODUCTION(Begell House, 2017)
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ItemFrom Necker Cubes to Polyrhythms: Fostering a Phenomenological Attitude in Music Education(UNIV ALBERTA LIBRARIES, 2016-01-01)Phenomenology is explored as a way of helping students and educators open up to music as a creative and transformative experience. I begin by introducing a simple exercise in experimental phenomenology involving multi-stable visual phenomena that can be explored without the use of complex terminology. Here, I discuss how the “phenomenological attitude” may foster a deeper appreciation of the structure of consciousness, as well as the central role the body plays in how we experience and form understandings of the worlds we inhabit. I then explore how the phenomenological attitude may serve as a starting point for students and teachers as they begin to reflect on their involvement with music as co-investigators. Here I draw on my teaching practice as a percussion and drum kit instructor, with a special focus on multi-stable musical phenomena (e.g., African polyrhythm). To conclude, I briefly consider how the phenomenological approach might be developed beyond the practice room to examine music’s relationship to the experience of culture, imagination and “self.”
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ItemBack to the Future: The Proud Legacy of Melbourne's Colonial Women Comopsers(The University of Melbourne, 2017)Likening women’s suffrage to the decapitation of octogenarians might nowadays seem extreme, but the above quote indicates that such was the mood of the times in fin de siècle Melbourne. In a society undergoing rapid change, the Woman Question centred on women’s suffrage but penetrated every area of society. The role of the Woman Question in social, political, and literary debate is well-known, yet it also manifested strongly in the world of music. In fact, music played a crucial role in enabling the ‘New Woman’ to break the confines of the family home and the separate spheres.1 In this article, I offer some notable examples of such women musicians and address some of the reasons why their work as composers, improvisers, performers, and teachers remains unrecognised and underestimated. Arguments testifying to their profound and lasting legacy are put forward, and some suggestions made for how their work may be restored to its rightful place in history.
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ItemFinding a discourse voice in academic research, and all that jazz(ASME, 2017-07-15)
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ItemSelf-regulation and the high school jazz and improvisation learner.(ASME, 2017)Common to all musicians, and not just improvising ones is the development and adaptation of sensory-motor, audiative, imaginative and self-regulatory strategies. They develop self-regulatory behaviors of learning that involve the evolution of specific goals, strategies, self-evaluation, adjustment, reflection and monitoring of progress. Yet, whilst learning takes place in our minds, and as fascinating as neuroscience can shed light on music education, learning and teaching is negotiated within social and communicative environments. Recent cognition theories suggest that learning involves the attainment of automation, and the meshing of embodied skills and knowledge acquired through situated and experiential learning, acknowledging that from a social-cognitive perspective self-regulatory processes - learning to learn, and learning to be creative can be viewed as a set of relations that are actualized, mediated and activated through transactions among individuals, environments, and socio-cultural relations. Research on self-regulation that enhances creative processes has extended beyond the synthesizing of convergent and divergent thinking, and of teaching creatively and for creativity. Recent discourse on creativity now aligns with that of self-regulation in arguing that these principles are layered within a more complex distributed nature of learning and expression of knowledge, that identifies self-regulation, co-regulation and socially shared regulation of learning. Creativity scholars such as Burnard, Glaveneau and Sarath similarly articulate a ‘WE’ paradigm of emergent processes that evoke multiple creativities that mark a conspicuous and striking aspect of thinking, learning and self-regulation that enhances creativity in music-making.
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ItemSTEAM Education: Fostering creativity in and beyond secondary schools(Art Education Australia, 2017)Current educational policy is dominated by a discourse of transferability, scalability and innovation, within a climate politicised by ‘creative industries’ and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education in Australia. STEM has been promoted as an authentic and engaging approach to education, particularly as Australia tries to boost its performance in international testing. However, STEM has consistently been challenged by STEAM, where ‘arts and design’ represent the ‘A’. STEAM advocates for creativity and expression to be included as a core part of any interdisciplinary approach. There is no defensible reason why the ‘A’ of arts should not be included in domain interconnectedness and the development of critical and creative thinking skills’ preparation of students for the global economy. Assessing the ‘state of play’ involving STEM and STEAM in Australia, this paper considers the widespread adoption of STEM in education, and its missed opportunity for integrating arts skills and capacities into the creativity agenda. Harris (2016) has argued in favour of a more ‘ecological’ whole-school approach to fostering creativity that promotes not only creative approaches to STEM subjects, but importantly arts subjects as well, including environmental, partnership and professional development components. The Harris Creativity Index is reviewed, and salient creative skills and capacities posited which allows teachers to implement pedagogical procedures that can improve creativity within schools through more whole-school transdisciplinary STEAM approaches.
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ItemCreative Formats, Creative Futures(University of California Press, 2017-06-01)As creative economies and industries continue to impact emerging markets and cultural conversations, creative education seems no more central to these conversations than it was a decade ago. Two recent Creativity Summits marked a collaborative milestone in the global conversation about creative teaching, learning, ecologies, and partnerships, signaling a turn from nation-based approaches to more globally-networked ones. This essay and the summits offer not only an international and interdisciplinary survey of the “state of play” in creativity education, but also collaboratively-generated strategies for strengthening creative research in tertiary education contexts, teacher education, cross-sectoral partnerships, and policy directions internationally.
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ItemBeyond Ropar Bar: Transcultural and transformative collaborations of the Australian Art Orchestra and the Young Wagilak Group(Information Age Publications, 2017-03-31)
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ItemEmotion, Embodied Mind and the Therapeutic Aspects of Musical Experience in Everyday Life(Greek Association of Primary Music Education Teachers, 2013)The capacity for music to function as a force for bio-cognitive organisation is considered in clinical and everyday contexts. Given the deeply embodied nature of such therapeutic responses to music, it isargued that cognitivist approaches may be insufficient to fully explain music’s affective power. Following this, an embodied approach isconsidered, where the emotional-affective responseto music is discussed in terms of primary bodily systems and the innate cross-modal perceptivecapacities of the embodied human mind. It is suggested that such an approach may extend thelargely cognitivist view taken by much of contemporary music psychology and philosophy of music by pointing the way towards a conception of musical meaning that begins with our most primordial interactions with the world.