"More Than Just Composers": Teachers' Identities as Music Creatives and the Impact on Teaching Composition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The large research study on which this paper draws examined the preparation of early-career teachers (ECTs) in New South Wales to teach composition and musical creativity. Presenting data collected through a Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) research design, and semi-structured interviews and themes, this article explores the theme of Musical Identity as it arose in the larger study. Through discussions with ECTs and composers who have experience teaching composition in NSW secondary schools, this study examined and compared these groups’ personal definitions of composition and perceptions of composer/creator identity and explored the implications of these definitions and identities on how these groups approach composition instruction in NSW secondary schools. These discussions revealed that participants held a wide variety of definitions of composing and the composer identity, stemming from composition’s strong Western Art Music (WAM) connotations, and these ambiguities presented themselves as barriers for the participants to teach composition effectively. Literature in this area indicates that, with relatively little pedagogical understanding of it, composition is neglected in initial teacher education (ITE) programs in Australia, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As music education activities should be facilitated using processes and paradigms that reflect the paradigms of students, music teachers’ personal definitions of composition need to be broadened through their ITE experiences. In order to democratise the act of creating music, syllabus terminology and requirements should be revised to reflect these broader definitions of music creation in NSW secondary schools.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".