Studio-Based Instrumental Learning

Kim Burwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317048848
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Studio-Based Instrumental Learning, Kim Burwell investigates the nature of lesson interactions in instrumental teaching and learning. Studio lesson activity is represented as a private interaction, dealing with skill acquisition and reflecting a tradition based in apprenticeship, as well as the personal attributes and intentions of participants. The varied and particular nature of such interaction does not always lend itself well to observation or - when observed - to easy interpretation. This presents particular problems for practitioners wishing to share aspects of professional knowledge, and for researchers seeking to explain the practice. Focusing on a single case study of two clarinet lessons, Burwell uses video observations and interviews to analyse collaborative lesson activity, through the 'rich transcription' of performance, verbal and nonverbal behaviours. The foregrounded lesson interactions are also contextualised by the background consideration of social, cultural and institutional frameworks. The research is aimed a helping to create a framework that can support reflection among practitioners as they continually develop their work, not only experientially - through the tradition of 'vertical transmission' from one musician to another - but collaboratively, through the 'horizontal' sharing of good practice.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The broad intention in this book is to examine the interaction between teacher and student as they engage in studio-based instrumental teaching and learning. A case study based on a doctoral thesis, it undertakes a micro-analysis of the collaborative behaviour of teacher and student as they cultivate the complex skill of musical performance, and considers this behaviour in the light of the personal, social and cultural context.

It is assumed that the reader who is an instrumental teacher, an instrumentalist, a fellow researcher or any combination of these, will already know a good deal about these matters. The experience of engaging with instrumental teaching and learning offers all participants a personal and individual insight into the subject, that not only draws upon the technical and musical, but the emotional and social aspects of our selves. For many of us this has represented an ongoing and dynamic source of identity.

Instrumental teachers have been aptly described as reflective practitioners, developing their work and indeed identities through the process of reflection. Dewey explains that this involves ‘not simply a sequence of ideas, but a consequence – a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each outcome in turn leans back on, or refers to, its predecessors’ (1933, p. 4). For reflective practitioners this can be a responsive and self-referential undertaking. It is also fluid: if it is a way of thinking, or a kind of knowledge in itself, it is not easily fixed or defined. Schön describes this in terms of on-the-spot experiments: ‘We think up and try out new actions intended to explore the newly observed phenomena, test our tentative understandings of them, or affirm the moves we have invented to change things for the better’ (1987, p. 28).

Viewed in this way, the business of instrumental teaching and learning involves the acquisition, development and application of reflective powers. All instrumental and vocal teachers will have met with the problem of supporting students who want answers, rules, certainties; who are bemused and frustrated to be told that ‘it depends’. As they mature as practitioners, many students struggle to appreciate that the contingent nature of the subject is its very essence, and that what their lessons might offer is induction into a discipline that consists more in doing than in knowing: in cultivating dispositions to frame, work and solve problems that exhibit aspects of both art and craft.

These aspects of instrumental teaching and learning can be challenging and exciting, and yet they present teachers with particular problems. The teacher’s work can be developed continually, experientially and reflectively, but the reference points available to teachers are typically narrow and in a sense, vertical: each can respond to her ongoing experience as a teacher, and each can respond – positively or negatively – to her historical experience as a student, but few have the opportunity to share their reflections ‘horizontally’ – with contemporary practitioners. The aspects of the work that defy definition also set constraints on any discussion of that work outside the context of the activity itself. This problem is exacerbated by the professional circumstances of teachers, who are often engaged by institutions on a part-time basis or work privately; who are unlikely to share a background in formal teacher training; and who typically teach on a one-to-one basis. In this way the nature of the subject and the nature of the profession leave reflective practitioners working in relative isolation.

There is an obvious gap here, an opportunity to facilitate the reflective practice essential to instrumental and vocal teaching and learning, and this is where research comes in: in helping to develop frameworks for discussion that can support reflection.

Legend has it that reflective practitioners are likely to resist discussing their work outside the context of their own studios; Schön attempts to explain such an attitude by putting into their mouths remarks such as, ‘While I do not accept [traditional academic views] of knowledge, I cannot describe my own’, ‘My kind of knowledge is indescribable’ and ‘I will not attempt to describe it lest I paralyze myself’ (1983, p. viii). Such remarks are not without validity; in my own experience as a teacher I have sometimes wondered whether it is possible to explain too far – that the more concrete an explanation, the more likely it is to be simplified, artificial or misrepresentative; or the more temporary its value. It would seem that Howard is sympathetic to such notions, when he describes the teacher’s choice of words as ‘necessary to start things off and to make corrections’ in a lesson, but quickly left behind, so that ‘refinements in their usage seldom keep pace with the elaborate developments in the activities to which they refer’. In the context of practice this can result in a reliance on a shifting vocabulary, ‘enlisted more or less ad hoc as the occasion demands’ (1982, p. 74).

The practitioner’s vocabulary-in-trade may make her remarks seem unhelpfully vague when taken out of context, and the ‘vertical’ and experiential traditions of learning mentioned above tend to limit the opportunities for finding common terms for discussion. These traditions can result in dynasties of teaching: thus Kingsbury, in describing conservatoire traditions, refers to pedagogical genealogies, to teachers as the nodal points of student cliques, and to highly individual approaches to teaching that members might wish to defend (1988, pp. 37–45). While individual approaches need not be regarded as incompatible or even as distinct schools of thought, the vocabularies and attitudes involved may represent obstacles in the development of professional discussion. It seems possible for example that teachers who have established sophisticated and successful practices through traditional approaches, might be cautious about embracing the ‘training’ opportunities that formal staff development might be taken to represent.

Similarly, there is probably a widespread attitude among practitioners of harbouring reservations toward research. Researchers are relative newcomers to the field: while studio-based instrumental teaching and learning represents centuries of tradition, much of the current body of research has been accumulated only over the last generation. Progress has been slow, too, not least because research knowledge is different in nature from practice knowledge. The researcher seeks to explain aspects of practice rather than to operationalize them, and must try to establish an objective distance between herself and the subject. Although personal insight and expertise may offer the researcher some clues about what questions to ask, and how to interpret findings, the intervening collection and analysis of data must be conducted as methodically and transparently as possible. Unlike the practitioner, the researcher must always explain how she knows what she knows, so that the reader is in a position to make reasoned judgments about its validity. If research has the capacity to enrich our understanding of a subject that otherwise relies on personal contact among practitioners for dissemination, such an aim can only be responsibly approached through painstaking procedure.

For the moment this has meant that for practitioners, research findings have often seemed either limited in relevance or too obvious to be interesting. In a relatively new field for research, the researchers are hardly in a position to offer conclusions or advice that might be of direct use to practitioners. It is not the role of research, however, to do so. Bowman argues, rather, that research has a more indirect relationship to practice, ideally serving to ‘[expand] the range of fruitful possibilities for future action and future decisions’:

The primary way research improves music education, [to the extent it does], is by helping us approach new problems more intelligently, more imaginatively, more creatively, more flexibly. It does this not by discovering and dispensing facts, but rather by helping us better understand problems and their significance for action. (Bowman 2005, p. 162)

If research findings cannot, and are not intended to, offer a prescription for action, they can help to identify issues, offer new perspectives, encourage and support ongoing reflection and assist practitioners in sharing their reflective processes. If researchers can convince practitioners that their observations represent authentic possibilities of practice, they might also be able to help them in developing a framework for discussion, and in identifying matter for discussion, that – perhaps unlike, for example, anecdotal evidence – can be shared among individual studios, specific instrumental traditions and even different musical styles.

A long-term engagement with research, and particularly in my own case, practitioner research, has allowed me to enjoy more opportunities than most to discuss instrumental teaching and learning with other practitioners, in formal and informal settings. In spite of what might be the inherent constraints on such discussion, I have always found my fellow practitioners to be equally fascinated by the subject, and enthusiastic about reflecting on, discussing and sharing their thoughts and feelings about it. Within the Music Department at South England University, and in visiting other institutions of music education, I have seen research findings provoke eager and insightful responses from teachers glad to have further food for thought, and glad to identify further common ground for shared reflection. With the research presented in this book, I would hope that I might be able to contribute more, and in other ways, to this conversation.

***

My interest in this subject stems from three related sources: my own student career, which in many ways has never ended; my professional work as both a performer and teacher of music; and more than ten years’ involvement in research in a university music department, investigating the conduct of instrumental and vocal lessons.

Participating in and then observing many instrumental lessons over many years, I have been interested in the behaviour of teacher and student, not only in terms of what they say and what they play, but in terms of the roles that would seem to be laid out for them, as distinct from what each brings to that role. I have been interested too in how the behaviour of one is implicated in the behaviour of the other: how the participants act together in a collaboration which may be more or less smooth, more or less fruitful, constantly changing and often surprising. My conviction from experience as a teacher and a student is that neither can single-handedly determine the nature of the interaction.

To the extent that instrumental teaching and learning involves verbal behaviour, some preliminary efforts to contribute to the shared knowledge of the subject have been made previously at my own university, which will be known here as South England University (SEU), and these efforts provide a backdrop for the current study. Research into instrumental teaching and learning in the SEU Music Department was instigated in 1998, by a research team comprising David Pickup, Vanessa Young and myself. A large part of the team’s research has been focused on the investigation of verbal dialogue between teacher and student in the setting of individual lessons. Salient issues have included the content of dialogue, as participants discuss the various areas of study within the subject (Young, Burwell and Pickup 2003; Burwell 2003a); the distribution of talk between teacher and student, and how that might vary according to the personal attributes of participants (Burwell, Young and Pickup 2003; 2004; Burwell 2005); and the vocabulary used to discuss a practice which is largely ineffable (Burwell 2003b; 2006).

Verbal behaviour of course represents only one aspect of instrumental teaching and learning that might be analyzed. The tools used in the early phases of our research were turned toward generalization over a sizeable number of lessons, particularly in quantifying the wordage devoted to various areas of study, and the distribution of lesson dialogue between teacher and student (Young, Burwell and Pickup 2003; Burwell 2003a; 2003b; Burwell, Young and Pickup 2003; 2004). Later a more qualitative approach was taken in the examination of lesson dialogue, with special reference to the teacher’s use of questions and of metaphor, worth exploring in themselves (Burwell 2005; 2006). In this study I wanted to take an approach which was quite different: which would at once allow a deeper exploration of individual cases, and evoke a stronger sense of context for lesson behaviour.

In addition to reviewing verbal behaviour more closely, I had become interested in exploring another salient aspect of instrumental lessons: performance behaviour. To date, we had investigated how teachers and students talked, conscious however that it is somewhat artificial to consider that separately from what they were talking about (Folkestad 2005, p. 283). The nature of lesson talk is predicated by its subject to an extent that has only been recognized relatively recently, through developments in the epistemology of practice (Schön 1983; 1987; Howard 1982; 1992); to understand verbal behaviour in lessons it is necessary to examine its relationship with performance behaviour. This is all the more so because – as our research at SEU has suggested – the distribution of both kinds of behaviour between teacher and student is likely to be asymmetrical: whether in performing or in speaking, the roles of the two participants seemed to be quite different from each other, in quality and quantity. The notion that participant behaviour in instrumental lessons is likely to be distinct from what is found in other educational settings has also been endorsed, albeit indirectly, by a number of relatively early research studies in instrumental teaching and learning. In these, expectations of the teacher’s verbal behaviour, based on classroom research, were disappointed (Kostka, 1984; Yarbrough and Price, 1989).

Finally, although verbal and performance behaviour seem to complement each other as interrelated aspects of instrumental teaching and learning, I had become interested in behaviours which fell into neither category. This interest evolved within the current study, as I moved repeatedly back and forth between the research problem and the analysis of data, and in the first instance it was driven by a felt response to the data: a feeling that the lesson interactions I observed were somehow variable in consonance. The feeling arguably stemmed from my experience and values as a practitioner, and in principle therefore I could position myself in the role of researcher as instrument, and make legitimate use of my tacit or intuitive knowledge (Lincoln and Guba 1985, pp. 39–40). This seemed reasonable enough, particularly if I were to be as self-conscious and explicit as possible about my position in the research; but although they might be seen as tools, or conscious influences on the research process, it would not be sufficient to present either myself or my tacit knowledge as research evidence. Instead, I sought first to substantiate my impressions, and second to understand the variation among individual cases.

The desire to substantiate my impressions led to a closer investigation of lesson behaviour. This included the addition of other functions of verbal and performance behaviours, including joking and apologizing, modelling and imitation. It also led to the investigation of nonverbal behaviours, such as the use of physical gesture, posture and space. Each of these added a little to the dimensions of the lesson that could be articulated and described. The desire to understand the variation among individual cases led to a consideration of how lesson behaviours could be connected or contextualized, through reference to the individual attributes and perceptions of participants; to the Performance Studies course of which instrumental lessons are part; and to the nature of the institution, which in turn draws upon traditions such as the university, the conservatoire and the broad musical culture.

As a performance student, a performance teacher, and – I would now wish to argue – performance researcher, what I have found most exciting about learning is that with each step forward its potential grows; each opportunity to learn more is another candle lit, revealing a little more of the expanse of the Aladdin’s cave ahead. This personal aside is closely linked to the research aims of the current study. As suited to a subject that continues to prove, to me, ever-increasing in complexity and richness, my research aim is to understand more, to open the subject further by revealing more of its complexity, rather than attempting to define it. Wittgenstein helpfully questions whether it is always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture with a ‘sharp’ one; and although his Philosophical Investigations explore such thinking on too great a scale to be justly represented here, another of his remarks seems relevant:

We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. (Wittgenstein 1953/1972, p. 42; italics original)

Through the micro-analysis and close description of a small-scale case study, this book seeks to give an interpretative account of lesson behaviour that might be recognized by practitioners as an authentic possibility within the practice of studio-based instrumental teaching and learning.

Research Aims

With a central interest in the processes involved in studio-based instrumental teaching and learning, this study explores a series of ‘how’ questions:

1. How is instrumental teaching and learning undertaken?

2. How does the conduct of instrumental teaching and learning vary with participants?

3. How is the interaction between teacher and student contextualized?

The focus of the inquiry is the instrumental lesson, and specifically, the example of clarinet lessons; but the procedure to be studied is not clarinet playing itself, but how it is taught and learned. Instrumental teaching and learning is regarded as a practice in itself, and the first research question asks how teacher and students engage in that practice through lesson interactions. The texture and dynamics of those interactions are explored through the micro-analysis of a small-scale case study, consisting in one teacher giving single lessons to two individual students. These lessons, captured on video tape, are examined in terms of specific collaborative behaviours, alongside the participants’ own comments about their activity in the filmed lessons.

This will be case study research, and because its scope will therefore be bounded, the meaningful interpretation of the case may depend on the consideration of contextual issues. Thus the third question is focused on links that might be drawn between lesson behaviour and the sociocultural setting of the practice. This may include reference to the institution – the Performance Studies course at SEU along with its aims and assessment procedures – as well as the broader professional and indeed artistic aspects of musical performance. Further, it might be possible to draw other links among lesson behaviours and the individual characteristics, perceptions and biographies of participants.

The second question presupposes that lesson behaviour does vary with participants, though in a case study bounded by only two lessons, the scope to examine the potential variety of behaviour is necessarily narrow. Comparison however is not the chief object of this research, but a means of introducing a further dimension into the study of the subject, effectively an element of triangulation that might enrich the interpretation of lesson behaviour. Importantly, too, the study of two lessons rather than one highlights the significa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Epistemology of Instrumental Teaching and Learning
• 3 The Instrumental Lesson
• 4 Framing Instrumental Lessons
• 5 Fieldwork Design
• 6 Lesson A
• 7 Lesson B
• 8 Exploring Studio Interactions
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index