Entrepreneurial Music Education

Professional Learning in Schools and the Industry

Kristina Kelman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030371289
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030371296
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

This book addresses the gap between formal music education curricula and the knowledge and skills necessary to enter the professional music industry. It uses extensive data from a long-running research project where high school students were invited to start their own business venture, Youth Music Industries. Not only did this act as a business venture, but it also functioned as a learning environment informed by the concepts of Communities of Practice and social capital. Exploring how entrepreneurial qualities were developed, their learning was subsequently captured and distilled into a set of design principles: in this way, a pedagogical approach was developed that can be transferred across the creative industries more broadly. This book will be of interest and value to scholars of music education, as well as those preparing students for the creative industries.

© The Author(s) 2020

K. KelmanEntrepreneurial Music Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37129-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kristina Kelman¹

(1)

Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove, QLD, Australia

Kristina Kelman

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

My principal role for the last 17 years has been that of secondary school music educator. I have taught in a variety of schools in Australia, ranging from a small co-educational private school to a boys’ grammar school and, more recently, to a selective and innovative public school. I have worked as a classroom teacher and Head of Department, and as director of various ensembles and choirs. Throughout this time, I have also balanced my teaching career with a freelance career as a professional musician, a practice that is not unusual for music educators. This dual practitioner/educator role has been a major influence on my educational philosophy, and has convinced me of the need to provide my students with connections to the music industry. This connection has also highlighted and modelled the multiplicity of skills needed to sustain a career in the industry.

At the beginning of my career, I was thrilled to have my students eagerly hang off my every word. I brought my formal, disciplined past into the classroom, believing that if I had learned that way, then my students should and could as well. The musical training, I received throughout my undergraduate degree involved learning and developing the skills and dispositions of Western classical music. For the most part, this was a very solitary journey where I spent four hours a day at the piano in a practice room. This was the approach I first brought to the music classroom as a young teacher.

The educational needs and demands of my students have since changed. We are now living in a profoundly digital world where the foundations of knowledge are constantly shifting (Loader, 2007). My students are increasingly self-sufficient learners and can acquire specific skills and knowledge through other channels, such as informal learning in garage band contexts, tutorials on YouTube, music programmes at their church, and part-time employment. I began to ask myself what it means to be a music teacher today. How might I respond to this emerging context? These questions motivated me to revisit past assumptions and to seek an updated approach to my teaching practice. While I was exploiting the latest trends in music technology and ensuring that learning experiences were collaborative, I still found that students were disengaged. This is because the international curriculum offered at my school, was designed to feed students into a performance-oriented conservatorium or tertiary course. This project, on the other hand, is underpinned by the premise that if young musicians are to enter music industry careers and prosper, they need a broader set of skills that are not currently addressed in the official music syllabi.

In 2007, I was appointed as music teacher to a new and selective arts-focused high school in Australia. This position offered a unique opportunity to create an innovative music programme that could supplement the conventional music curriculum.

The School

The school in which this research was conducted was designed as part of a government strategy to develop selective specialist senior secondary schools in the public sector in an effort to stem the drift of students to the private sector (Doherty, 2009). The school aims to nurture and encourage the next generation of creative entrepreneurs and knowledge workers, to enhance excellence in the arts and build social cohesion in a global and multicultural society. The school’s vision resonates strongly with the creative industries’ agendas profiled above. The school believes that there must be aligned action and shared vision among the government, the education sector, and industry artists. The Queensland Government’s Smart State Strategy report (2008) acknowledges the contribution that arts can make to our schools and artists. To achieve an aligned vision, schools should be drawn into the wider arts and cultural community and into creative industries while, at the same time, the arts and cultural community and creative industries should be drawn into schools. The challenge is to realise the necessary conditions for such dynamic arts and education partnerships.

This ambitious and innovative vision conflicts with the more conservative overarching curriculum chosen for the school. While the school that is the context of this study promotes a creative and innovative pedagogical environment, there is an intensified focus on academic results in order to maintain and enhance a public image. The international curriculum was implemented as a point of difference in the market, and in this curricular market, returns to a more traditional, disciplined curriculum. The chosen curriculum offers a rigorous and structured course that is heavily content-based and time-intensive. Corbett’s (2007) interview with teachers teaching the same curriculum, concluded that ‘the courses are so packed with content, there is little room for critical self-reflective teaching and learning on a day-to-day basis’ (p. 31).

By the nature of its assessment, the music curriculum privileges the more formally trained musician with a high level of music literacy. For example, students over the course of two years are expected to recognise and analyse music covering the last five hundred years of the Western Art music tradition, as well as contemporary pop, jazz and Non-Western musical styles. This work culminates in a three hour externally assessed exam of seven essays. Five of these are based on score and audio excerpts, and two are based on two set works from Western Art Music. Musical analysis comprises 50% of the subject. The remaining assessment is a twenty-minute solo recital focusing on technical skill and stylistic awareness, and a composition folio that demonstrates technical skill and proficient development of musical ideas. This prescriptive curriculum sits in stark contrast to the local curriculum offering set out by the Queensland Core Curriculum Authority, (QCCA) which was designed to allow greater flexibility and adaptability, recognising the importance of developing twenty-first century skills.

As opposed to the rigorous assessment regime prescribed by the school’s chosen curriculum, the QCCA music curriculum assesses students on four summative tasks selected out of ongoing assessment in a two-year period: a composition developed in any style or genre and communicated in any format; a performance including solo or ensemble playing, accompanying or conducting; a multimodal integrated project combining a musicological investigation which informs either a performance or composition; and an external exam requiring an extended response to any style of music. These tasks can be negotiated by the student, based on student-interest, and assessment can be updated and improved on throughout the two-year course (Queensland Government, Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2019).

Many of my students were highly talented, though informally trained, and typically collaborated with others in the popular ‘singer-songwriter’ genre. In contrast, the focus of the chosen music curriculum is more about an individual pathway, with students being assessed largely on solo performance and academic work. Kamin, Richards, and Collins (2007) found that popular musicians are positively influenced by peer learning; however, this is difficult to design in the chosen music curriculum due to the nature of its assessment. The mismatch between student aspirations and the curriculum has contributed to an attenuated environment, where student retention has been quite poor. Each year, some students withdrew from the subject ‘Music’, which had initially been the primary reason for their enrolment at the school.

The impetus for this study came about after many informal discussions with my students about whether they should remain enrolled in this selective school or return to their former schools. They expressed a desire for a meaningful, relevant and industry-connected experience. They wanted to develop the skills and confidence to engage directly with the music industry and to build sustainable careers.

I became interested in the concept of entrepreneurial learning and how being connected with others is a core component of entrepreneurialism. Given the more contemporary musicians in my classroom, I also began some preliminary research into how popular musicians learn. Followin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Making a Case for an Entrepreneurial Music Education in Schools
• 3. Current Approaches to Education—But What About the Music Industry?
• 4. Building the Emerging Professional Learning Model
• 5. Designing an Entrepreneurial Learning Project
• 6. Developing Social Skills for Entrepreneurship in the Music Industry
• 7. Learning About Project Management for Entrepreneurship in the Music Industry
• 8. Acquiring Domain Knowledge for Entrepreneurship in the Music Industry
• 9. Design Principles to Plan Entrepreneurial Learning in Music Education
• Back Matter