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Getting Smarter Music: A role for reflection in self-directed music learning

Don Lebler    

Conservatories all over the world are re-examining their educational roles and practices in a changing cultural and economic context, including re-evaluating their function as sites of relevant learning. This dissertation by publication contributes to this re-examination by investigating understandings of assessment, evaluative reflection, the relationship between know-how and knowledge, autonomous learning, community of practice and the student experience of these pedagogies in one Queensland conservatorium.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Don Lebler, welcome Don

Don Lebler: Hi

Interviewer: Can you please tell us what your Research was about?

Don Lebler: Practitioner research study of a program that I’m involved with called the Bachelor of Popular Music Program which is run by the Queensland Conservatorium on the Gold Coast Campus of Griffith University.  It’s a very unusual program because for a start it deals with popular music not as an object of study but as an artistic act so it has to do with the creation and performance of popular music as opposed to the study of other people’s music.  That in itself is very unusual but even more than that the pedagogical approach that we take in the program draws as heavily as it possibly can on the ways that popular music is learnt by members of the broader community and that involves learning as opposed to being taught because people will generally speaking acquire ability to do popular music in informal ways rather than going to a teacher and being taught so that involves a lot of peer interaction, peer feedback, independent and interdependent learning activities so the people will gather together in like minded groups and develop their abilities in a kind of collective way.  They also frequently in the broader community will engage with more than one way of making music so  they maybe a singer and instrumentalist and they may have a number of other strings to their bow as well so when the program was first conceptualised, it was intended to try and incorporate as much of that informal practice into a structured setting as we possibly could so it departed radically from all other Conservatorium or higher education models of music learning.

As such because it was new, we felt it was very necessary to investigate it rigorously to make sure that our assumptions were correct and to find out as much as possible about the actual student experience of that process so that we could better inform the ongoing development of the program which is constantly under review and modification, tweaking, so that’s what the study is basically about……trying to get as accurate a view as we can of what our students bring to the program in terms of the learning capacities that they’ve developed through learning popular music independently and interdependently before they come into the program and how the sorts of things that we overlay over that process affect the way that they’ve learnt music or the way that go about that practice.

Interviewer: Ok, and what have been the key findings so far and what would you expect to find out in the future investigation?

Don Lebler: Well one of the first steps was to actually confirm some of our assumptions and that is that people that come to a University to learn about popular music are going to be broadly similar to people that don’t come to a University to learn about popular music so there is some anecdotal evidence at the time the program began in 1999, very little published evidence about how people went about learning popular music but there have been things published subsequently that confirm that the general assumptions about the way people do that so firstly we need to make sure that our cohort actually was representative of popular music practitioners in general so looking at their prior history, prior learning history where popular music is concerned was an important part of it.

A lot of what we do can be generally termed as reflective activities so we oblige people to write reflectively about not just what they’ve done but how the learning processes unfolded in each of the activities that they do so that’s been a large part of the investigation is to see how those artificial reflective practices, the obligation for example to express things in words or in writing that would previously be just intuited, looking at how that reflective practice has impacted on people’s music making but also because in the broader community people will tend to solicit feedback from each other, from their peer group, from the people with whom they’re connected musically rather than rely on a teacher for feedback, we’ve used a lot of things like peer assessment for example in a very real way, a meaningful way, for example the students actually do generate the summative assessment of their peer’s work and looking at the veracity of that process has been an important part of the investigation too, to make sure that people aren’t being disadvantaged by being assessed by peers as opposed to being assessed by staff only so we use a mix of assessment processes, self assessment, panel assessment which is a group of peers and one staff member so it’s not truly peer assessment because there’s a staff member involved in it too and there is also staff assessment of various aspects so we wanted to see how all that worked. 

Then wanted to make sure that as well as enhancing people’s ability to make music, we were really seeking to have a positive impact on their ability to learn, their understanding of the ways in which they go about learning more generally than just music so these reflective processes needed to be looked at and we need to see how students experience that and how they…in what proportions they value the various kinds of reflective activities that were engaged in… that they engaged with in the program.

So essentially we’ve found that people who do come to us are representative of the broader popular music practitioner community, they have learned in independent and interdependent ways, they rarely have learnt in lesson situation under the guidance of an expert mentor teacher type of person so our assumptions about their capacities were correct. In terms of the ways that the program processes impact on their music making, that’s all been very positive too, the students actually do value the range of skills in addition to those natural popular music skills that they acquire through participating in the program and in terms of outcomes, well the outcomes are very positive too, not only do they make music to a higher standard than they probably would have done otherwise but they also appreciate those other aspects of their increased connection with the ways that they learn and they feel empowered in ways in addition to making music through the process so it’s been a very positive experience to have a look at this, it feeds back into our continual development of our learning system.

Interviewer: What are the implications of this sort of research for the future of music programs?

Don Lebler: I think for particularly…..obviously for popular music if people are going to connect with popular music in a meaningful way, what our study demonstrates is that there is not really any danger in adopting popular music pedagogical practices rather than just picking up popular music and plonking it into the traditional conservatorium teaching structures in other words you don’t have to…….teachers don’t have to be in control of everything, instead of being the source of all knowledge and controlling every step of the way and giving people sort of a stepped progressive program to go through you know learn funk music this semester and then you do rock and roll or some kind of sequencing with content, it’s perfectly okay to allow students to be self directing and to discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of a range of styles so people that are dealing with popular music don’t necessarily or shouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to do that in the traditional all-knowing teacher compliant student way that conservatoriums usually go about the teaching of music.

So there is that, there is also some work from other people which says that this pedagogical approach actually works very well for non popular music for example western classical music particularly with younger people……with people in, well the study so far have been exclusively to do with secondary students in the UK but they’ve been using essentially popular music pedagogy to engage young people with western classical music and they found that it’s a more effective way of getting people engaged with classical music than the traditional teaching-focused approach.  So this popular music pedagogy which is sort of like a producer/user combined role has  much more applications than just popular music so I think there’s a long way to go before this kind of approach would be broadly adopted in conservatoires or University Music Departments because it is so different from the established model but I think the study demonstrates adequately that it’s a very viable alternative and it’s something that people could consider as replacement for part of the traditional conservatoire pedagogy if not all of the traditional pedagogical approaches so bit by bit it may well feed into innovation in conservatoires more generally and on a global level conservatoires and higher education music institutions are going into a self reflective phase or are currently in a self reflective phase and they’re looking at their practices with a view to measuring their relevance in the 21st century so hopefully the study will contribute meaningfully to that international reflective process.

Interviewer: Okay good we might leave it there, thank you very much for your time and sharing your research.

Don Lebler: It’s a pleasure