Missing voices in music education: music students and music teachers explore the nature of the high school music experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study provides a qualitative examination of the Canadian high school music experience. Using narrative inquiry (the "retrospective meaning-making" [Chase, 2005, p. 656] that people engage in when they tell their personal stories), and an interpretive, constructivist approach (developing analytic interpretations of participants' worlds that offer challenges or extensions to current practice), I sought to understand the meaning that 32 former high school music students make from their school music experiences. Seven experienced music educators dialogued with me about key challenges in music education practice. Debating the questions what does it mean 'to know' in music?, what should we do with the musical knowledge students bring to our classes?, whose repertoire should we teach?, and are we creative or only re-creative in our music teaching?, these teachers shared their views and made clear the complexities, uncertainties, and joys of teaching high school music. Two theoretical frameworks were especially helpful in interpreting the former student interviews. Figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998, develop this framework from the theories of Bakhtin) and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) provided rich structures for data analysis. The extent to which high school music is a self-making and community-making experience is much greater than I imagined. Music-making is a vehicle for authoring both self and worlds. It is a particularly potent vehicle because of its collaborative, embodied, temporal, non-discursive, playful, sensual, and occasionally transcendent nature. I consider ideas from writers on happiness, embodied cognition and spirituality, in tandem with insights from a variety of education and music education scholars and from the "missing voices" of former students and practising teachers to develop suggestions for expanding secondary school music education practice. I examine issues affecting teacher professional growth in order to articulate impediments to changing practice. Systemic issues of schooling create formidable barriers to effective, transformational professional development. I identify two kinds of professional growth experiences that evade these impediments by circumventing institutional constraints, putting professional development in the hands of small groups of music educators. Empowered and affirmed music educators are better positioned to transform practice.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".