Musician-Teacher Collaborations

Altering the Chord

Catharina Christophersen, Ailbhe Kenny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138631595
• eBook ISBN: 9781351804592
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Musician-Teacher Collaborations: Altering the Chord explores the dynamics between musicians and teachers within educational settings, illustrating how new musical worlds are discovered and accessed through music-in-education initiatives. An international array of scholars from ten countries present leading debates and issues—both theoretical and empirical—in order to identify and expand upon key questions: How are visiting musicians perceived by various stakeholders? What opportunities and challenges do musicians bring to educational spaces? Why are such initiatives often seen as "saving" children, music, and education?

The text is organized into three parts:

• Critical Insights presents new theoretical frameworks and concepts, providing alternative perspectives on musician-teacher collaboration.
• Crossing Boundaries addresses the challenges faced by visiting musicians and teaching artists in educational contexts while discussing the contributions of such music-in-education initiatives.
• Working Towards Partnership tackles some dominant narratives and perspectives in the field through a series of empirically-based chapters discussing musician-teacher collaboration as a field of tension.

In twenty chapters, Musician-Teacher Collaborations offers critical insights into the pedagogical role music plays within educational frameworks. The geographical diversity of its contributors ensures varied and context-specific arguments while also speaking to the larger issues at play. When musicians and teachers collaborate, one is in the space of the other and vice versa. Musician-Teacher Collaborations analyzes the complex ways in which these spaces are inevitably altered.

Part I

Critical Insights

2

When Collaborations Go Beyond Teachers and Musicians Alone: Frame and Stakeholder Analysis as Tools for Arts Advocacy¹

Hildegard C. Froehlich

Introduction

Collaborative efforts among various constituents engaged in seeking to strengthen the place of music schooling as a part of compulsory schooling constitute situated actions, which might benefit the discourse if critically examined. Focusing on situations in which music educators act as one special-interest group among many stakeholders, the chapter introduces elements of frame and stakeholder analyses as a research tool for unpacking the at times rather tenuous relationship between and among educators, artists, the public, and policy makers. Such active involvement in learning to understand “otherness,” it is argued, could benefit engagements in interdisciplinary collaborations of all kinds, but might especially strengthen research on arts advocacy and policy work.

Setting the Scene

The parent association of an elementary school in a rural area of the Midwest United States has urged the principal to assure that at least as much instructional time is allotted for the visual arts as is already allotted for music. To accomplish that goal, the principal asks the music specialist to let go of 35 percent of instruction time per week per class to make such rebalancing possible. Most immediately, the music teacher’s reaction is one of resistance. His program is a strong one, and he would like to keep it that way. However, upon considering his situation in the bigger picture of what’s best for the students, best for a sense of collegiality between him and the art specialist, and best for his own relationship with the principal, he realizes that working with the art teacher might be his wisest pathway. Together, the colleagues come up with a rotation plan of instruction that culminates in a winter program in which both art and music are publicly presented in the form of painted scenes that depict seasonal songs performed by the children. The performance program includes handwritten notations of the songs similar to what the children have seen in reproductions of medieval musical manuscripts. Brief written essays on the history of musical notation accompany the song displays. The project turns out to be the beginning of many programmatic collaborations thereafter. In terms borrowed from interactionist theories, of which frame and stakeholder analyses are a part, the music teacher opted for embracing a stake favored by others rather than himself.

Collaborative efforts among all sorts of groups and communities, not just those shared by music and art teachers or teachers and professional musician-artists, are generally considered a desirable as well as necessary part in strengthening, if not affirming, the place of music schooling as an educational goal for all school-aged children. But calls for cooperation and collaboration in the arts and arts education also occur when public funding of educational programs becomes an issue and budget cuts threaten the place of the arts in a curriculum. It is in those moments that special-interest groups in the arts and education often seek to strengthen their collective political power by proposing collaborations among music teachers and teachers in the visual arts and/or drama, professional artists/musicians and educators, or similar special-interest groupings.

An example from the United States that may illustrate the successful collaboration between different interest groups to solidify the place of music in the curriculum is that of a project known as the Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum, an 18-lesson sequence that explored “Mississippi History through the lens of the Mississippi Blues Trail” (Washington Post/Associated Press 2014). With the help of blues scholar Scott Barretta, music educator Mark Malone designed the curriculum, drawing from research about “people, places and events significant in developing the local music.” This information had become available as the result of the construction of highway markers along Highway 61, also known as the Blues Highway. The curriculum’s core learning objectives evolved around “Music, Meaning, Cotton, Transportation, Civil Rights and Media.” The program was pilot tested at Tunica Elementary School (Tunica, Mississippi, near Highway 61), where the students (mostly fourth graders, that is, generally nine- to ten-year-olds) learned rhythm and blues chord patterns, wrote blues songs about themselves and their surroundings, and studied poetry on past and present travails of growing cotton. The importance of the program was agreed upon by several interest groups (representatives from the Mississippi arts commission, state education board, school administrators and board members, parent association, social studies and music faculty). Without knowing the details of all negotiations involved, the story of the Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum may nonetheless serve as an example of how a diverse group of stakeholders became collaborators, finding common ground in the process of articulating and implementing a reportedly successful model curriculum for a particular locality in the United States (for further information, go to https://www.howtolearn.com/2014/01/social-studies-with-the-mississippi-blues-trail-curriculum).

Common to nearly all collaborative projects are the time and effort necessary to debate and negotiate goals and objectives, as well as methods of implementation among those groups who have a stake in reaching their envisioned goals. Differences in viewpoints, artistic preferences, and educational priorities require dialogue, especially with “other”-minded colleagues in the arts, education, and governmental agencies. It takes political know-how and negotiating skills to make sure that all groups stay “on board” throughout the process of distilling one common purpose from a variety of individual interests, preferences, and values. In such situations, which the (U.S.) National Association for Music Education (formerly known as MENC) refers to as “[thinking] beyond the bubbles” (NAfME 2014), tensions can and do arise because of often-conflicting professional identities, disagreements about funding priorities, and diverse aesthetic predilections (Caust 2003; Christophersen 2015; Christophersen et al. 2015; Garnham 2005; Kenny and Morrissey 2016; Kenny 2010). Although everyone may be well intentioned to find the best solution to a specific challenge, each potential collaborator also brings to the project her own interests and preferences that derive from personal history and biography, her expertise with an artistic medium, and cultural as well as creative biases. These interests and biases color and shape the stakes that are brought to the collaboration and that, if not clearly articulated, can lead to unwanted discord among all collaborators during all phases of a project, from its planning to—once implemented—its evaluation.

Any situation in which differences in viewpoints, artistic preferences, and educational priorities must be identified and sorted out would bring together what Goffman (1974/1986, 8) called “situated perspectives.” In particular, participants in dialogues with “other”-minded colleagues in the arts, education, and governmental agencies bring those situated perspectives to bear on decisions with consequences for later actions. This chapter makes the case that researching and fully understanding the perspectives each collaborating participant brings to an envisioned project might be key to the success of such a project. In such larger collaborative undertakings as the Mississippi Blues Curriculum described earlier, no one perspective may be assumed to be self-evident or remain unchallenged. In fact, one might assume that the larger a project and the more groups of individuals are involved in the decision making, the more special interests, often competing, tend to be embedded in a complex system of individually held artistic and social values, group norms, and power hierarchies that determine a particular group’s stated or assumed goals (Frey 2003; Heclo 1978; Reed et al. 2009). Thus, whether the pathway is that of professional musicians collaborating with music teachers, general educators with licensed school music educators, or music teachers with their visual arts, drama, or science colleagues, knowing what stakes each participant brings to the table should be considered an essential component in articulating a project’s goals, implementing them, and assessing their overall benefit for the students. However, not only educational and artistic values are in question, but communal and social benefits as well (Baumgartner and Jones 2002; Benham 2011; Torgerson 2003; Vennix 1996).

In this chapter, two analytic tools—frame and stakeholder analysis—are proposed as ways for identifying what different groups of individuals bring to the table in light of larger, overriding goals. Those goals may be about what teachers and musicians value when collaborating with each other in a local school, what several schools cooperating with each other wish to accomplish for the benefit of the entire community, or what elected and appointed representatives of special-interest groups hope to achieve when seeking to advance the course of school music through public activism and political action.

Frame analysis, developed by Erving Goffman (1974/1986), is rooted in symbolic interactionism, a pragmatic social theory that originated in the United States in the early twentieth century. Frames are the meanings individuals bring to their interactions with others (Brooks 2007; Edgley 2003; Goffman 1981a; Reynolds and Herman-Kinney 2003). Fully understanding those meanings can strengthen purposeful discourse. Stakeholder analysis, first mentioned in organizational and management literature during the 1970s and 1980s, examines relationships between individuals (Brugha and Varvaskovszky 2000; Reed et al. 2009). In the looking glass of interactionism, “stakes” are valued focal points in a person’s perception of the world and, thus, interactions with others. When these become the factual givens that determine the success of all subsequent phases in collaborations of all kinds, knowledge about the stakes that individuals bring to a discourse is not a “necessary evil” but a “necessity” (Kavaratzis 2012, 7).

Frame Analysis

Each person’s perceived reality becomes, in Erving Goffman’s (1974/1986) terms, a “frame.” It is the set of concepts and perspectives present in individuals, groups, and societies that result from lived experiences and that guide observable actions. To understand framing as it shapes any interaction, one needs to ask (with Gregory Bateson), “what is really going on here?” The types of framings Goffman considered were frame fabrications, keying, frame breaks, misframing, and … frame disputes” (Goffman 1974, 497–498). Of those terms, keying (perhaps the least self-explanatory) is defined as “the set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be quite something else” (ibid 44). Goffman also suggested that “mode” might have been a better term than “key” (ibid 44), alluding to the fact that when dialoguing participants are “keyed” to the urgency of an issue, they actually are in different “modes.” An example of applying the meaning of keying to the Mississippi Curriculum project might be what each participant harbored as the concept of “music” before the project began. Whereas one participant, possibly the social studies teacher, may have had the singing of seasonal songs in mind, the music teacher’s primary framework might have been her full knowledge of what a traditional fourth-grade skill set in music was expected to be. At first, these notions likely guided both participants’ deliberations. Eventually, however, the “key” to the shared framework was that of the blues as the glue that held the curricular activities together.

Frame fabrication, “the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on” (Goffman 1974, 83), is possibly the least easily detected but the most manipulated form of discourse. One speaker’s intentions are not what they appear to be or what the speaker purports them to mean. Fabrication means to intentionally be vague about the context in which an activity is planned. Here, an example might be the ambiguity found in many arts policy statements to generically endorse or mandate instruction in music and the fine arts in a curriculum (see, for example, Arts Education Partnership 2014). Although possibly sufficient for policy makers taking action by voting for or against such a proposed legislation, the rather vague wording is likely less helpful when school administrators, practicing teachers, and artists seek to implement the policy in the context of a particular school curriculum. An intentionally vague wording early on in the process can run the risk of weakening the effect of the legislation later.

Unlike frame fabrications, frame breaks and misframing are not necessarily intentional but can happen as the result of unforeseen circumstances and/or misused or misunderstood terminologies. The latter may be the case when definitions of terms are assumed rather than spelled out or when terms in one geopolitical setting do not match with their meaning in another. The latter may occur, for example, when the often-heard European reference to “Didaktik” and “Bildung,” two essential terms in the German tradition of music education philosophies but not necessarily meaning the same in their Anglo-American usage, may and can lead to breakdowns in communication across international groups of arts advocates.

Misframing easily brings about frame disputes, a phenomenon similar to what many years ago Walter Gallie (1956, 97) called “essentially contested concepts” (see also Gallie 1955; Miles 2012). The meanings of seemingly well- understood and shared terms and concepts are at first assumed, but differences in interpretation and definition become clear as the discourse unfolds. Such may be the case when words like “musical,” “beautiful,” “democratic,” “education,” or “artistic” enter a conversation. Although it is easy to refer to the terms themselves, it is less clear whether everyone agrees on their specific meaning. Thus, whereas leaders in one special-interest group may frame the discourse in a particular way to make information agreeable to all group members, the nature of the discourse changes when each participant adds or even superimposes his or her own frame in the process (D’Angelo and Kypers 2010; see also Entman 1993, 2007; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Heimovics et al. 1993; Kuypers 2006). It is easy to hypothesize that the more groups seek to collaborate with each other, the more likely frame disputes arise, a risk that results from the desire to reach out to other special-interest groups for input and participation. In such situations where collaborations require the cooperation between local-level private interest groups and state as well as national political-legislative representatives, it may not be uncommon that such tangible, quantifiable benefits as academic progress, functional literacy, the development of social skills, a productive citizenry, and economic growth through the arts are cited more frequently by all collaborators than seemingly idealistic, intangible quality-of-life issues that are b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Collaborative Journeys Across Pedagogical Cultures: Attunement and the Interplay of Knowing and Unknowing
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Critical Insights
• Part II Crossing Boundaries
• Part III Working Towards Partnership
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index