The Wow Factor? A Comparative Study of the Development of Student Music Teachers' Talents in Scotland and Australia

For some time there has been debate about differing perspectives on musical gift and musical intelligence. One view is that musical gift is innate: that it is present in certain individuals from birth and that the task of the teacher is to develop the potential which is there. A second view is that musical gift is a complex concept which includes responses from individuals to different environments and communities (Howe and Sloboda, 1997). This then raises the possibility that musical excellence can be taught. We have already explored this idea with practising musicians (Stollery and McPhee, 2002). Our research has now expanded to include music teachers in formation, and, in this paper, we look at the influences in their musical development which have either 'crystallised' or 'paralysed' the musical talent which they possess. Our research has a comparative dimension, being carried out in Scotland and in Australia. We conclude that there are several key influences in the musical development of the individual, including home and community support, school opportunities and teaching styles and that there may be education and culture-specific elements to these influences

How doctoral students and graduates describe facilitating experiences and strategies for their thesis writing learning process: a qualitative approach

This study considered the sources of facilitating experiences and strategies for thesis writing from doctoral students and graduates (N=30). The sample was balanced between Science and Social Science knowledge areas, with equal numbers of English as Second Language (ESL) participants in both groups. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were used to explore issues around feedback, training, cohort experiences and personal strategies for writing. Four-hundred pages of transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis with the assistance of specialist software (NVivo). A generative model of academic writing development was chosen to frame the analysis. Fifteen themes emerged, three of which are discussed: supervisors’ feedback, personal organisation and ESL learning strategies. Results show the perceived benefits of individually tailored supportive feedback and the importance of the students’ resilience. Original learning strategies from ESL students that may benefit non-ESL students are also considered. The conclusions outline implications for supervisors and students across knowledge areas

Shaping Metrics for HEI Cultural Engagement - Knowledge Transfer

An application was submitted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for support for a project that would identify and define activities deemed relevant to Knowledge Transfer (KT) - Cultural Engagement (CE), and propose appropriate means to evaluate them. It was acknowledged from the outset that efforts at agreeing “metrics” for the impact of such activities had been attempted before, albeit with limited success. (One such notable example has been lately provided by the Higher Education and Business Community Interaction Survey (HEBCIS) which has collected some data on social, community, and cultural engagement for some years; however, the robustness and consistency of the data for these purposes have often been questioned.

The role of alcohol in constructing gender & class identities among young women in the age of social media

Research suggests young women view drinking as a pleasurable aspect of their social lives but that they face challenges in engaging in a traditionally ‘masculine’ behaviour whilst maintaining a desirable ‘femininity’. Social network sites such as Facebook make socialising visible to a wide audience. This paper explores how young people discuss young women’s drinking practices, and how young women construct their identities through alcohol consumption and its display on social media. We conducted 21 friendship-based focus groups (both mixed and single sex) with young adults aged 18–29 years and 13 individual interviews with a subset of focus group respondents centred on their Facebook practices. We recruited a purposive sample in Glasgow, Scotland (UK) which included ‘middle class’ (defined as students and those in professional jobs) and ‘working class’ respondents (employed in manual/service sector jobs), who participated in a range of venues in the night time economy. Young women’s discussions revealed a difficult ‘balancing act’ between demonstrating an ‘up for it’ sexy (but not too sexy) femininity through their drinking and appearance, while still retaining control and respectability. This ‘balancing act’ was particularly precarious for working class women, who appeared to be judged more harshly than middle class women both online and offline. While a gendered double standard around appearance and alcohol consumption is not new, a wider online audience can now observe and comment on how women look and behave. Social structures such as gender and social class remain central to the construction of identity both online and offline

Boston University Percussion Ensemble, November 15, 2008

This is the concert program of the Boston University Percussion Ensemble performance on Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 7:30 p.m., at the Boston University Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were In the beginning there was rhythm by Sofia Gubaidulina, Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich, Midnight Mediation by Jane Stanley, ...dust into dust... by John Luther Adams, Mantra II by Ramon Humet, and Stonewave by Rolf Wallin. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Towards pedagogies of creative collaboration: guiding secondary school students' music compositions

The pedagogy of creative collaboration in music classrooms is hardly clear from the literature. There are plenty of strategies for setting up composition activities and some useful models for peer and self-assessment. But what about the nature of the interaction between the teacher and the students, and amongst the students themselves, as the composition is unfolding? How can these interactions facilitate the development of the students’ independent thinking? And what is the influence of the teachers’ background on their approach to facilitating creative collaborations? This chapter explores these matters by first reviewing some literature and then profiling a case study of an English secondary class that has composition as part of the music curriculum. Transcripts of student and teacher observations were studied and then summarised for illustration, in the form of vignettes. In the discussion the music teacher background is considered, charting critical incidents in her education and professional path. The chapter closes with suggestions of building blocks for the design of pedagogies of creative collaboration

The Forgotten Classroom? Bringing Music Encoding to a New Generation

Digital methods have begun to make their way into the research practices of music scholars, and most this insurgence can be attributed to the rise of the discipline of music technology. Though music encoding is becoming increasingly prevalent among the research and teaching methodologies of music scholars, evidence gathered from course descriptions and presentations at national meetings of music scholars would indicate that encoding continues to lag other music-based technologies. Drawing from the advancement of music technology and the experiences of digital humanities teaching and scholarship, this paper presents a path for the music encoding community to promote greater integration of encoding and digital methods more broadly into the pedagogical practices of music historians and music theorists

instance: Soma-based multi-user interaction design for the telematic sonic arts

The telematic work instance is a performance for viola and dance that digitally connects performers in Vancouver and Cape Town. The network interface enables a violist and a dancer to simultaneously play multi-user digital music-dance instruments over the internet with music and dance. The composition, design and performance interaction of instance draw from acoustic multi-user instrument paradigms and music-dance interactions in the African performing arts to explore the idiosyncrasies of the telematic performance space. The iterative design process implements soma-based research methods to inspire sonic compositional material with the body and to explore the performers\u27 embodied experience of sonic aesthetics during their interaction

The sound of violets: the ethnographic potency of poetry?

This paper takes the form of a dialogue between the two authors, and is in two halves, the first half discursive and propositional, and the second half exemplifying the rhetorical, epistemological and metaphysical affordances of poetry in critically scrutinising the rhetoric, epistemology and metaphysics of educational management discourse. Phipps and Saunders explore, through ideas and poems, how poetry can interrupt and/or illuminate dominant values in education and in educational research methods, such as: • alternatives to the military metaphors – targets, strategies and the like – that dominate the soundscape of education; • the kinds and qualities of the cognitive and feeling spaces that might be opened up by the shifting of methodological boundaries; • the considerable work done in ethnography on the use of the poetic: anthropologists have long used poetry as a medium for expressing their sense of empathic connection to their field and their subjects, particularly in considering the creativity and meaning-making that characterise all human societies in different ways; • the particular rhetorical affordances of poetry, as a discipline, as a practice, as an art, as patterned breath; its capacity to shift phonemic, and therewith methodological, authority; its offering of redress to linear and reductive attempts at scripting social life, as always already given and without alternative