Whole school singing at two Canadian independent secondary schools: "it is the life-blood of our school"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the phenomenon of whole-school communal singing at two Canadian independent secondary schools. Research questions included: What does the practice of whole-school communal singing look like, how is it experienced by participants, and how has the practice been initiated and maintained? Previous research on whole school singing at the secondary school level is scant. This suited an exploratory, phenomenological research methodology for the present study. Pascale’s (2005) two aesthetics of singing provided the theoretical framework. The idea that choral singing can be approached through a broader lens than is currently practiced in typical choral education contexts helped to characterize whole school singing as a communal singing practice. Research literature explored prior to data analysis focused on communal singing, defined as participatory singing by everyone in a non-choir community. Examples included crowd singing at sports games, at protest marches, and in churches. Communal singing in North America was more popular in the early 20th century than today, which may explain its rareness in contemporary secondary schools. Data were collected through interviews with 17 current and former students, faculty and administrators at two schools. Analysis was conducted using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), supported by NVivo software, and resulted in five overarching themes. The first was that all the research participants expressed a strong positive regard for the practice of whole school singing; the second was that communal singing may contribute to student belongingness. The third overarching theme was that communal singing appears to mediate emotions and may contribute to student wellness; fourth, that the approach taken to whole school singing at the two schools prioritizes full participation over achieving aesthetic qualities typically espoused by performance choirs. The fifth theme was that whole school singing at the secondary school level is not easy to initiate and maintain, but requires specific leadership, intention, and strategy in order to create a fully participative, engaging, and joyful experience in a secondary school context. Post data analysis, findings were compared and contrasted with those from related research. Recommendations are provided for educators who may wish to consider incorporating communal singing into school life.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".