Teaching Primary Music

Alison Daubney

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526421548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Istruzione elementare

High quality music education can start children on a journey that lasts a lifetime. This book gives beginning primary school teachers clear guidance on how to successfully teach music without recourse to specialised training. It places music within the wider context of the primary curriculum with clear links to the new National Curriculum in England. It also offers advice on how to provide evidence for and assess musical development and how to plan for music education across the EYFS and key stages 1 & 2. Useful information on using the musical resources in your local community to enhance the opportunities offered to your school is also provided. This is essential reading for all students studying primary music on initial teacher education courses, including undergraduate (BEd, BA with QTS), postgraduate (PGCE, School Direct, SCITT), and also NQTs. Alison Daubney is a music educator, researcher and curriculum adviser at the University of Sussex.

1 Music: Its Place in Our Lives and Education

Peering through the school hall door, I noticed the beaming smiles of Mrs Clark’s Year 3 class stomping around the room to ‘Nellie the Elephant’, which was blaring from the speakers. Most were marching in time with the music and each other. Weaving in between their haphazard pattern was Mrs Clark, joining in with evident delight, making eye contact with children as she marched around, pumping her arms in time and with gusto. With the music in full flow, the room suddenly fell silent. Abruptly, the activity stopped and the children and teacher froze mid-move.

Introduction

What did you see and hear in your mind as you read this? Did it portray your pre-conceived image of a music lesson; one filled with sound, energy, movement and enjoyment? Were you the teacher in the middle of the room, joining in, communicating, modelling – integral to this musical community?

Or perhaps it was accompanied by a sigh as you lamented on the thought of teaching music (which, for some, is a probable reason for opening a book such as this)?

This book is a journey into our sound world. It is about musical journeys, in the broadest sense. My belief is that what you bring to, and take from, this musical journey is of fundamental significance and importance to you and to the children you work with. Children need adult role models who are not all ‘professional musicians’. They need you, their primary school teacher, to be a part of the musical community in their school and classroom, taking part, leading learning and learning from and with the children.

Perhaps you hope that this book will give you ideas and the confidence to work with your class. I hope it will, but my ambition is that, by the end of it, you will also believe in your power to positively enhance education, learning and life. Music changes lives. As a teacher, you have the power to sprinkle magic through offering a musical education.

Remember though that if you don’t teach music, you cannot guarantee that someone else will, and by not teaching music many children will have seriously impoverished experiences. Their lives march on. They will never be 7 years old again. The time and opportunity for lasting and sustained positive impact is right here, right now (as Fat Boy Slim famously stated). You may not feel particularly confident about teaching music, but I urge you to try. An enthusiastic teacher and a ‘have a go’ attitude will get you a long way and will significantly benefit the children you work with.

I hope that along the way you find what you came looking for in this book: most of all, inherent self-belief in yourself as a musical being and the desire and confidence to nurture and share musical experiences.

Objectives

Through this chapter you will:

• consider the importance of music education
• examine and challenge commonly held assumptions about music
• explore what musical learning is and could be
• understand how music is integral to our fast-changing world
• gain confidence that you already know a great deal.

Why music?

We are in a world where educational powerhouses appear to encourage society to value academic prowess over all else, a world where children are frequently tested against a set of standardised, age-related norms in a very narrow set of ‘high stakes’ subjects (Kneyber, 2016). It is easy to forget that music is something very special and ever-present. Music is always with us – throughout and between every rite of passage from before we are born until after we die.

Following the 1988 Education Reform Act, music has been constantly present as a statutory subject in schools, falling within the National Curriculum, and was present in some form or another in many schools before the National Curriculum came into being. Nevertheless, we need to question its impact and position. Does music’s position in the curriculum cement its importance? Why do we teach music in schools? Why is it that many independent schools, with autonomy over teaching and learning, highly value music education and commit valuable curriculum and co-curricular time to it? Conversely, we hear weekly horror stories of state schools being under inordinate pressure to focus on the core subjects at the expense of the arts, creativity and culture, providing a narrow, constricted and frankly often dull and uninspiring education.

Notwithstanding the importance of music for its own sake, there is also a plethora of research demonstrating how music contributes to our personal, psychological, social, educational and emotional development and wellbeing (Fiske, 1999; Hallam, 2015). This is just the kind of thing we think head teachers want to hear, but it is not in itself a justification for teaching and learning music. Where do you stand on the ‘music is good for your development so it should be in education’ debate? Parents of young children probably don’t sing them songs at bathtime so that they will be better at mathematics. Clearly, then, music’s place in the curriculum is not there primarily because of its transferable learning possibilities.

Sometimes people consider that music is a special gift and you are either musical or you’re not. Some people consider that music can only be taught by ‘special people’ with a high degree of musical training and prowess. These are both nonsense. Frankly, we don’t do ourselves many favours here. In primary schools, we sometimes wheel in ‘specialists’ to teach music, leaving everyone else to think that they can’t do it or don’t need to (Hennessy, 2000). We perpetuate ridiculous ideas that we aren’t musical if we can’t read music, or that the teacher who can play the piano in assembly is the only one who can be labelled as a ‘musician’ in school. Yet musical experiences and the level of music education of generalist student teachers is often rich and diverse (Henley, 2016), and Ofsted (2009, 2012) notes that the quality of music teaching is often better in primary schools than secondary schools, where music is almost always taught by teachers with a high level of music qualification and subject-specific training.

It is of course the case that a minority of people seem extremely gifted at music and we could all name a few of these who appear on the world stage as virtuoso performers, conductors or composers. But music is for everyone. It can be accessed, enjoyed, learnt and taught by all. We need to put all ‘labels’ and preconceptions aside and recognise that music is a part of us all. To think otherwise is detrimental, as Howe, Davidson and Sloboda (1998: 407) report from a study entitled ‘Innate talents – reality or myth?’

The evidence we have surveyed in this target article does not support the talent account, according to which excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts … categorising some children as innately talented is discriminatory … Such categorisation is unfair and wasteful, preventing young people from pursuing a goal because of teachers’ or parents’ unjustified conviction that they would not benefit from the superior opportunities given to those who are deemed to be talented.

Regardless of whether or not it is formally taught, music is a constant presence in our lives (DeNora, 2000). Have you ever watched a 4-year-old spontaneously spinning around and singing along to their favourite Disney track, making sense of it within their own limited language? Babies babbling and smiling as their parents sing or beatbox to them? Teenagers absorbed in the music broadcasting through their headphones on a quiet train, occasionally slipping into the accidental verbalising of the lyrics they are listening to? Children already love music – our job in school (and life) is to nurture and help develop this love. It is no easy task though – music is highly personal, offering endless possibilities and tangents.

The flip side, though, is the fragility and responsibility that comes with this. I am arguing that you are the important person, the one who should nurture children’s interests, skills, confidence and creativity and develop ownership of their music. Yet there is a tension here too. It is their music, their soundtrack, not yours. You have your own, which is also constantly evolving as you negotiate your way through life. There are times to scaffold learning, to collaborate or stand back and times to learn from others, times to listen, suggest, sympathise and offer support and guidance, to set up creative landscapes, to share skills and knowledge or signpost others who can. Clearly, music education is multi-layered and complex but your contribution, enthusiasm and guidance are both integral and fundamentally important.

The importance of positive experiences in music education

Reflecting on musical experiences often reveals how important these were in shaping people’s attitudes to teaching music and themselves in relation to music (I am hesitant to say ‘as a musician’ because I think the term itself is value-laden and unhelpful). Mostly, in my experience of working with teachers and trainee teachers, people fall into four distinct groups:

1. People with limited memories of music education as a pupil, where it appears to have been vacuous both within and beyond school at that point in their lives.
2. People with positive memories relating to at least one significant part of their own education (either primary school, secondary school or both). This often relates to playing musical instruments, singing or performing; they may recall fondly either an influential person or group of people – often a teacher, family or friends – and the social aspect of music is also evident.
3. People who had positive musical learning experiences or influences outside of school but failed to see the relevance of music in school; it seems that their musical identity memorably evolved in spite of their music education in school.
4. Unfortunately, though, many people fall into the fourth group; education research shows over and over again that: ‘people who at a young age were told that they were not musical seldom enjoy a childhood of growing musicianship’ (Lehmann, Sloboda and Woody, 2007: 49).

It is sad that many people recall impoverished experiences of music education themselves or were left with the impression that they are not musical. Unsurprisingly, this blights their own self-view in relation to their abilities and confidence to teach music. Pitts (2012) reveals the powerful potential of music education to shape identities – and not always positively.

Lehmann, Sloboda and Woody’s hard-hitting statement must be at the forefront of our minds when teaching or interacting with people, regardless of the subject. As teachers, we are extremely powerful when it comes to how we make people feel. What we say and how we act can be misconstrued, misunderstood and taken to heart. A child only needs to hear once that they are ‘tone-deaf’, cannot play in tune, have no sense of rhythm, should mime instead of sing, or be refused entry to the choir because it will spoil the sound, and they will potentially carry that crushing judgement with them throughout their lives. Music needs to be accessible, engaging, challenging, inclusive and, perhaps most importantly, overwhelmingly positive for all. Otherwise, it may inadvertently send negative messages and contribute to adults spending many years avoiding situations in which they feel musically and socially vulnerable or embarrassed.

Task 1.1

Reflect on your own musical experiences:

1. What can you remember about music education/musical influences when you were of primary school age?
   • How did you feel about yourself in relation to music at that time? Were you influenced (positively or negatively) by anyone or anything in school? How did you engage with music at this age?
   • What about music at home and out of school? Who and what influenced you? What kinds of memories of music do you have from out of school?
   • What three words or phrases would you use to sum up your feelings about music at this age?
2. Think through the same questions above in relation to yourself as a secondary school pupil.
3. Then move on to consider: At what point in your educational career did you stop studying or participating in music in school? Or did you continue? What about out of school? What influenced these decisions? How did you feel about them at the time? What about now?
4. Thinking about all of these experiences, what do they tell you about your own music education and the impact of people and events to shape your musical identities and feelings across time?

Building on what children already know

… a music teacher never meets musically ignorant, untutored or uneducated pupils: on the contrary, when pupils come to school they all possess a rich and in some ways sophisticated musical knowledge, acquired from a variety of outside-school musical activities (Folkestad, 2006: 136)

It could be rephrased as ‘a pupil never meets a musically ignorant, untutored or uneducated teacher’, but unless we share our musical identities with children, they probably assume that teachers don’t listen to popular music!

Children and teachers come to school with a wide range ...