Exploring breathwork paradigms of South African singing education lecturers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explored the breathwork paradigms of South African Singing Education Lecturers (SASingEdL) through the lens of a Life Skills educator. The current South African Curriculum and Assessment Policy (CAPS) requires Life Skills educators to teach the concepts of ‘breathing awareness’, ‘breath control’, and ‘breathing exercises’ in the school classroom. Within the Life Skills curriculum, these breathwork teaching and learning (BWTL) concepts are categorised under the ‘warm up and play’ topic of the Performing Arts category. More specifically, these concepts form part of ‘vocal warm-up’, i.e., singing. However, exactly why and how these concepts should find application in the classroom is poorly articulated in the CAPS. Subsequently, learner textbooks reflect a meagre effort towards BWTL. One specific leaner textbook series used in South African schools ignores the subject altogether. There is compelling evidence from educational studies in the Americas (USA, Canada), Oceania (Australia, New Zealand), Europe (Germany), and the Far East (Japan, India, Singapore, Taiwan) that demonstrates how BWTL plays a beneficial role in learner well-being. Thus far, to my knowledge, no noteworthy study in this regard has been undertaken in South Africa. With the aid of breathwork, learners can address their anxiety levels, regulate their emotions, and attain mental focus. However, the benefits of well-being derived from breathwork require a fair degree of breathwork literacy. Therefore, it is vitally important for Life Skills educators to be well prepared in breathwork concepts to enable them to convey these to the learners. This study envisioned an emergent singing education breathwork teaching and learning (SingEdBWTL) framework for use by Life Skills educators. Such a breathwork framework can guide lecturers at Higher Education Institutions to aid future educators, assist Life Skills educators to animate breathwork concepts in the school classroom and be a valuable tool for future BWTL research in South Africa. Underpinning this qualitative interpretative study, the Russian Systema Method seven principles of breathing (RSMSPB) was employed as a theoretical framework. Besides extensive literary reviews on breathwork principles and the role of breathwork for well-being, data were gathered primarily through nine semi-structured interviews, supported by document analysis. The deductive data analysis approach culminated in a proposed Singing Education Breathwork Quotient (SingEdBWQ).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".