Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Research Publications
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ItemHidden diversity in the conservatoire: A qualitative enquiry into the experiences of higher education music students with disability(SAGE Publications, 2024)Students undertaking higher education music degrees represent a rich tapestry of experiences, cultures and needs. However, equity and inclusion issues related to music students with disability in higher education are frequently addressed in generic ways, and without consultation or consideration of their unique requirements. With limited research available, this qualitative study within an Australian Conservatorium of Music analysed the experiential and situated reflections of 18 music students with disability. Based on our reflexive thematic analysis, we propose that issues related to equity and inclusion for music students in higher education are multi-faceted and interrelated. By foregrounding the participants’ voice, the qualitative themes suggest that enhancements related to disclosure processes, quality of communication and reliability of resources, would fortify equity and inclusion. The findings span the need for reforms at the institutional level, as well as specific professional development for educators and awareness raising amongst the student cohort. Informed by the participants’ lived experience, the findings call for music educators, professional staff and institutional leaders to effectively apply features of inclusive, caring, professional practices so that music students with disability can thrive in higher education.
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ItemDirector perspectives to equity, access, and inclusion in the school jazz ensemble(Frontiers Media SA, 2022-12-20)Arts and culture are increasingly acknowledged as pillars of society in which all of humanity including people who identify as’ LGBTQIA+ can contribute in 21st century society. United Nations and individual country initiatives continue to promote the notion of inclusive, egalitarian values that promote equal access and opportunity to chosen careers and passions. Jazz as an artform has evolved as a form of cultural expression, entertainment, and political metaphor, subject to societal and populist pressures that have created both a canon and popularized history. Jazz education has moved from largely informal to almost wholly formal and institutionally designed methods of learning and teaching. The jazz ensemble or stage band remains an enduring secondary education experience for most students learning jazz today. This qualitative study of music directors investigates their approaches, perspectives and concerns regarding attitudes and practices in the teaching profession, the promoting of inclusive practices, access, and equity, amidst a pervasive masculinized performance and social structure that marginalizes non-male participation. The study provides implications for how jazz education may continue to evolve in both attitude and enlightened access in the education of jazz learners.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableInstrumental music teachers' development of feedback across the lifespan: A qualitative study(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2024-02)Feedback is a powerful influence on learning and achievement in the instrumental music lesson, though this impact may render positive as well as negative implications to learning. The impact of feedback is thus foundational to the ways music teachers impart knowledge, skill, planning, reflection, and student motivation. This article provides an analysis of feedback- feed up-feed forward concepts through a musical instruction lens, and reviews evidence related to the impact of feedback given on student learning and achievement. A qualitative investigation of Australian instrumental music teachers working in secondary schools, this study analyses cohorts of novice, developing and expert level teachers, progressing through initial theory-practice constructs, towards development and expertise of personalised and experientially dynamic feedback episodes. Expert level teachers reflect on a wider palette of approaches, with wisdom, passion, and the capacity for accommodating diverse learners and differentiated strategies. Discursive analysis of constructivist and student-centred approaches that infuse with explicit instruction are used to offer implications to how feedback can be used to enhance enduring learning and teaching in instrumental music studios and classrooms. It provides insights into teacher growth, knowledge, and development of instrumental music teachers in the profession across the lifespan.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFeedback in the instrumental music lesson: A qualitative study(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-07)This study focuses on the role of feedback in teaching with particular emphasis on its effect on learner performance, motivation, and self-regulation. A critical account of feedback and applicable models highlight conceptual guidelines of how individual, relational, and environmental factors can impact on the utility of feedback as a performance changing device, and reasons for theory–practice disjunction. A qualitative methodology investigated 25 instrumental music teachers in Victoria, Australia, realizing the effect of studio teaching feedback on students from teachers’ perspectives and recollections of their studio teaching practice. Knowledge and skills, positive attribution, and music and relational qualities are reported through these reflections of feedback, feed-up, and feed-forward approaches to student engagement. The study highlights positive feedback encounters are typified by learner engagement and teacher–student relationality, contesting the traditional, behaviorist “feedback ritual” and teacher-centered approaches in the music lesson. The study offers implications for purposeful and structured learning opportunities, and cyclical engagement that builds impactful feedback episodes and feedback design that factors in the influence of context, culture, and differentiated relationships in learning. The study encourages educators to consider balance of “drill and thrill,” where feedback is embedded as an influential pedagogical/relational device, rather than discreet episodes of educators “telling” learners about their performance.
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ItemBeing and becoming instrumental musicians and teachers: A post-qualitative exploration(Frontiers Media SA, 2022-10-13)In trying to understand the complex interplay between effective learning and personal experience in instrumental music education we look to our own histories of becoming instrumental performers trained in conservatoires. We seek a collective fusion of horizons of possibility to explore the relationships of musicians, both learners and teachers, with each other and their environments. We adopt the post-qualitative turn, as it offers space and place for simmering curiosities, introspections, evaluations, and yearnings. As pondering individuals, we question how we were pulled and prodded through the acquisition of instrumental expertise. We are a trumpeter and a clarinetist; we are performers. We are also music educators who both re-enact and resist what was given to us as gospel. We hope to find within our thick and layered experiences, understandings of the better teacher we hope to become. We look beyond our “training” to our becoming both musicians and pedagogues, a work that remains in progress. We offer this pathway to our students—how can we/they become the better music educator?
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ItemApprenticing the jazz performer through ensemble collaboration: A qualitative enquiry(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2020)The one-to-one teacher–student relationship is a common learning configuration within jazz education. However, opportunities to learn through engagement in ensemble performances and industry-level recording opportunities with esteemed jazz performers are rare classroom environments the tertiary jazz music institutions offer. This qualitative study examines ‘real-world’ jazz performance contexts within an Australian tertiary music course, exploring students’ learning experience spanning three diverse collaborative projects. Bandura’s Social Cognition Theory is utilized to elucidate an ecological system of musical development, where learning occurs in a social context within dynamic, reciprocal interactions between learners, environment and students’ adaptive behaviours that are bounded by context, culture and learner history. Findings from pre- and post-participation interviews reveal student and educator perspectives of engaging in authentic experiential learning situations. A stratum of positive influences impacting students included metacognitive, behavioural, emotional affordances, as well as the cultivation of a wider social, environmental and cultural/creative confidence and an expanding collaborative community influencing individuals’ learning decisions. Students and educator participants expressed professional-level expectations, real-world outcomes, and a deeper musical connection and understanding by students of the guest artist/composers’ intention, musical aesthetic and expert band direction. The authors maintain that inclusion of experience-based education and embedding of authentic professional industry experience and creative music-making contexts within educational settings enhance the learning of students and potentially enculturate richer musicianship in students and their developing creative communities.
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ItemInstrumental Music Education in the time of COVID: maintaining connection, community, and relationality with students(JMHW, 2021-10-20)For many countries instrumental music tuition in secondary schools is a ubiquitous event that provides situated and personalized instruction in the learning of an instrument. Opportunities and methods through which teachers operate during the COVID-19 outbreak challenged music educators as to how they taught, engaged, and interacted with students across online platforms, with alarm over aerosol dispersement a major factor in maintaining online instrumental music tuition even as students returned to “normal” face to face classes. This qualitative study investigated the practices employed by instrumental music educators in secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia, analyzing teacher perspectives to music tuition amidst the restriction of interaction with students remotely via online means. Thematic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed music educational approaches that fostered connection, empathy and receptiveness to relationship-building, guiding students in slower and deeper learner-centered approaches, asserting pedagogical practices that reinforced and promoted interpersonal connectedness in and through musical experience and discovery. These findings provide a framework for how music educators can facilitate connection, motivation and student autonomy generating personal meaning and commitment to music making and the learning relationship, which can translate to significant student learning and value in the learning music. Exploring teachers’ pedagogical practices and behaviors within this dyadic teacher-student relationship is a significant addition to the literature, enabling the consideration of the type of connective behaviors required to stimulate and develop long-term interest in music.
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ItemCollaborative learning experiences in the university jazz/creative music ensemble: Student perspectives on instructional communication(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2022-07)While the ensemble is a ubiquitous learning environment within jazz education, opportunities to learn through engagement in ensemble performances and industry-level recording opportunities are rare classroom environments tertiary jazz music institutions offer. This qualitative study examines jazz performance contexts within an Australian tertiary music course, exploring students’ learning experience spanning three diverse collaborative projects across nine months. Phenomenological analysis explores the instructional relationship outlining connection between the student and instruction, the subject matter that is taught, and the connection between the student and the teacher as master improviser. Findings outline substantive teacher crafting of learning, relationship building and learning experiences garnered from interpersonal learning relationships, and the application of content with pedagogy that aims to build a positive learning climate between improvising teachers and their students. The author contends that a phenomenological perspective can highlight this diversity and emphasize effective interpersonal strategies and ensemble pedagogies that enhance student learning and potentially enculturate richer and more sophisticated musicianship in students and their developing creative abilities.
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Item'In the cracks between freedom and fear': student reflections on identity and confidence learning in a creative music ensemble(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-02-23)The purpose of this study was to conduct a qualitative study examining ‘real-world’ jazz performance contexts within an Australian tertiary music course. Course projects were designed to offer students opportunities to gain a better understanding of the intersections of working and performing with their teachers in an improvised music ensemble. The study investigates reflection of students’ experiences and perceptions of learning dispositions, identity and creative growth across a nine-month academic year. Students’ individual and collective improvisational learning and development were investigated by examining perceptions and reflections upon identity making, confidence, as well as cultivation of creative voice. A framework of student reflective practice for creativity provides implications for creative ensemble approaches, strategies, goals and aims.
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ItemInstrumental Music Educators in a COVID landscape: a reassertion of relationality and connection in teaching practice(Frontiers Media, 2021-01-08)For many countries instrumental music tuition in secondary schools is a ubiquitous event that provides situated and personalized instruction in the learning of an instrument. Opportunities and methods through which teachers operate during the COVID-19 outbreak challenged music educators as to how they taught, engaged, and interacted with students across online platforms, with alarm over aerosol dispersement a major factor in maintaining online instrumental music tuition even as students returned to “normal” face to face classes. This qualitative study investigated the practices employed by instrumental music educators in secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia, analyzing teacher perspectives to music tuition amidst the restriction of interaction with students remotely via online means. Thematic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed music educational approaches that fostered connection, empathy and receptiveness to relationship-building, guiding students in slower and deeper learner-centered approaches, asserting pedagogical practices that reinforced and promoted interpersonal connectedness in and through musical experience and discovery. These findings provide a framework for how music educators can facilitate connection, motivation and student autonomy generating personal meaning and commitment to music making and the learning relationship, which can translate to significant student learning and value in the learning music. Exploring teachers’ pedagogical practices and behaviors within this dyadic teacher-student relationship is a significant addition to the literature, enabling the consideration of the type of connective behaviors required to stimulate and develop long-term interest in music.