Introduction to Research in Music — Weekly Assignment #1
June 4, 2023
My first graduate assignment asked me to consider issues in music education that interested me: things that affected both my career at large and the way that I taught music every day. It asked me to explore these issues as research topics, with an eye towards possible solutions.
The mixed-grade model at a Montessori school makes it difficult to teach cumulative music theory and instrument skills. At the Elementary level, the Montessori curriculum is designed around a three-year rotation. This allows children to stay in the same classroom from First to Third or Fourth to Sixth Year without repeating academic material. The presence of an assistant teacher allows for a grade-specific lesson to take place while other children are working on their own. In a music classroom, there is rarely (if ever) an assistant, so grade-specific lessons are difficult to arrange. This means that First Years experience their first music theory lessons alongside Third Years, who have known this material for two years. The same is true of instrument practice in the upper grades. Children will not learn if they are not challenged, and will not be challenged if they learn the same material three years in a row.
The research process for this problem would likely involve some work directly with students, as well as communication with the music teachers at several Montessori schools to get a sense of how they grapple with, manage, or have learned to overcome this problem. I believe that a proper investigation would be qualitative and anecdotal, with data focusing on each of several Montessori schools. At each school, reflections from the music teacher should be supplemented with conversation with students (specifically the youngest and oldest students) and possibly some classroom observation to get a full sense of the music curriculum and how the problem manifests differently at each school.
Small specialized private schools often require specialized teachers, but usually do not have enough students/work to offer those teachers full-time salaries. Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, and other alternative schools function differently from traditional public or even private education. In order to provide a high-quality education, specialists at these schools are expected to adapt to these philosophies in their classrooms, whether or not they have training or experience in them. Despite this additional expectation, alternative schools are usually small, and rarely have enough students to allow them to employ their specialists full-time. Both of these variables — the expectation of previous knowledge and the low pay — limit the applicant pool, so that these schools end up hiring specialists who either do not have an understanding of their alternative philosophies or who have one foot out the door in the event that a higher-paying opportunity comes along.
The research process for this problem would require participation from specialists and administrators at alternative schools, as well as a survey of administrative data from more traditional private schools for comparison. The investigation could be qualitative (discussions with specialists and administrators about the problem) or quantitative (a comparison of salaries and teacher retention data between traditional and alternative private schools), but would likely be most effective as a combination of the two.
Most established music teaching methods use databases of folk songs that children don’t know, and many of which children should not be taught in a modern classroom. Orff Schulwerk, Feierabend’s First Steps in Music, and the Kodály concept are all heavily based on folk songs, tales, and dances. At one point these songs were more directly relevant to preschool- and elementary-aged children, who might hear them at home and among friends, but many folk songs at this point are becoming what children might call “music class songs,” never encountered outside of the music room. Even more unfortunately, many folk songs from many cultures no longer hold up to cultural scrutiny, whether due to blatant racist content or to more subtle reinforcements of gender norms and other outdated, unhealthy schools of thought. In my own experience using Feierabend’s First Steps, I found that a shocking number of the “Preschool and Beyond” songs mentioned the sudden, violent death of a person or animal, and I was not able to use a large portion of the material in the book.
The research process for this problem would involve cooperation from practitioners of multiple music teaching methods, or just of one method if I chose to focus my research. There is also the possibility of some quantitative data from folk song collections and databases.