On 6 July 2023, the Final report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel was released. At the time, I wrote a response for AMIE (the Access to Music Education for Inclusion and Equity (AMIE) Network is a collective of scholars and innovative music professionals from around Australia working to ensure that the lives of all children and young people, no matter their background, ability, or circumstance, are enriched by a creative and culturally responsive music education).
What made me remember this post this week was seeing, for the first time, instructions from NESA (New South Wales Education Standards Authority) on what we need to add to our Music Education degrees to meet with the panel’s recommendations. To be honest, I was shocked to find that we will have to introduce so much irrelevant, non-evidence-based ideological nonsense into our degrees, presumably in place of things we currently think are important like knowing how music has been taught for the last 100+ years, practising those pedagogies, learning to plan/take a band/orchestra/choir/drum circle, finding out about the latest research, how to implement it, and other such frivoloities. Anyway, I thought I should share this blog here now, as I think this might be a discussion point as the year goes on:
Last week the government was presented with the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) report, Strong Beginnings, which made a series of recommendations designed to better prepare new teachers for schools.
The recommendations include the establishment of “core content”, which “reflects the knowledge and evidence-based practices that support ITE students in meeting the Graduate Teacher Standards and have the greatest impact on student learning”. The core content includes cognitive science, some identified pedagogical practices, classroom management, and strategies for responding to students culturally and contextually.
The “expert panel” that wrote the report would like the government to mandate this core content into every teaching degree in the country, and proving that this has been done will be part of new recommended compliance overseen by a new “ITE quality assurance board”.
If the quality assurance board is the stick, a carrot is also presented in the form of a link between performance of the universities and their funding. And if the new board isn’t enough, they also recommend public reporting of a new set of “transparent indicators for ITE programs”, including cohort selection, retention of students in degrees, perceived preparedness for teaching, student satisfaction with degrees, and employment outcomes.
The panel recommended a new system-wide approach to giving students the invaluable teaching experience they need in schools during their degrees, in line with new national guidelines for those practical experiences, and better support for mentoring in schools.
Finally, the panel recommended a number of measures designed to attract mid-career mature entrants into ITE degrees.
So to the question raised in the title of this article: do these recommendations offer any benefits for the music education of Australian children and young people?
Directly, they offer very little for music education. Research shows that there are two big issues that hold back Australian schools in offering all children engaging, cutting edge, and educative music classes, depending on the age group of children that you’re considering.
First, while every state and territory mandates the teaching of music in its primary schools, ITE programs do very little to train primary teachers to deliver the learning promised in the syllabi. Just last month, Hocking (2023) showed that music training within Australian primary teaching degrees had dropped 53% from 17 hours of training in 2009, to a shocking 8 hours in 2022. Most universities do not offer a primary music specialisation, and some states and territories (including the biggest, NSW) do not even accredit one, despite music being on their syllabi. In terms of recommendations for subject content expertise in music, Strong Beginnings has nothing to offer.
The second big issue that is holding back our field is that while all states and territories do offer some mandatory music study in secondary school, and as a result, universities do provide the specialisation for this age range, there is a gap between what research suggests students need at this age (for example, Abril, 2013; Cain, 2015; Kallio, 2017; Lamont, 2011; Lamont & Maton, 2010; Rose & Countryman, 2013), the training provided in many ITE courses, the syllabi provided by some states and territories (Humberstone, 2023), and practice reported (and often supported by our advocacy groups) in schools (Cain, 2015).
Strong Beginnings sets great store on “evidence-based practice” (pp. 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, etc.), but the research cited relates mostly to numeracy and literacy interventions for primary school-aged children. While a little of this research is broadly applicable to all teaching, assuming that it applies well to music education would be a mistake. For example, “explicit teaching, modelling and scaffolding practices” (p. 97) are useful for introducing concepts and approaches about music, but research shows that it is during a child’s musical practice (when often the teacher is not even present) that understanding and skills are cemented (Austin et al., 2006). This is because music is very much an embodied art form (Elliott & Silverman, 2015; van der Schyff et al., 2022). Put another way, you need to teach music, and make music, not just teach about music.
These weaknesses in Strong Beginnings may not just be bad for music, though. Research suggests that they may be the result of a particularly obdurate interpretation of the Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2021, 2023) that has driven the link between policy writers and education practices over the last 25 years. In comparable countries, as evidence-based practice captured politicians’ imaginations, university research bodies or independent research groups reviewed research to help teachers and governments decide what reforms might be made (Pring & Thomas, 2004). The way these reviews were performed (the rigorous academic processes), the roles of teachers and policy-writers, and the outcomes have been contentious.
However, here in Australia, politicians and policy-writers have often skipped over the university research bodies or independent research groups all-together. Some governments have established their own “research” centres, with employees directed to review the research that supports an existing party political ideology (Fuller, 2022a, 2022b; Lewis & Hogan, 2019; Stacey, 2017). In these cases, methodologies are not shared, the role of the teacher is not debated, and the findings are handed top-down as reports for teachers to implement.
Strong Beginnings reads very much like this kind of report. The group was chaired by Mark Scott, previously an influential figure in the NSW government’s establishment of the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE), which has been creating such top-down and opaque, non-reviewed reports to instruct teachers on practice for over a decade now (Fuller, 2022a; Lewis & Hogan, 2019). Scott is not a researcher. This is a version of “evidence-based” education where the report-writers cherrypick the evidence to suit a pre-determined narrative and to take teacher voice out of the educative process (Biesta, 2007, 2009, 2010).
Music education actually needs the excellent research we already have to speak for what our children need and want to get out of education. There is much literature that shows both the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of music learning to all children (Hallam & Himonides, 2022). We have well-investigated established pedagogies and highly skilled teachers and ITE teachers to train them, and if we listen to the evidence base, we know what we need to do to capture young people’s love of music and increase the numbers who learn to play and create. The broad brush strokes, however well-intentioned, in Strong Beginnings just won’t get us there. Even worse, a top-down, ideologically-driven process that directs teachers with spurious ideas from very specific research about “what works” (pp. 27, 104) in every subject, but that totally lacks open scholarly rigour, will just keep running Australian education down.
References
Abril, C. R. (2013). Toward a More Culturally Responsive General Music Classroom. General Music Today, 27(1), 6–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/1048371313478946
McPherson, G. (2006) (Ed). The Child As Musician. Oxford University Press.
Biesta, G. (2007). Why “What Works” Won’t Work: Evidence-Based Practice and the Democratic Deficit in Educational Research. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2006.00241.x
Biesta, G. (2009). Good education in an age of measurement: On the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 33–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-008-9064-9
Biesta, G. (2010). Why ‘What Works’ Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-Based Education to Value-Based Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(5), 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9191-x
Cain, M. (2015). Musics of “The Other”: Creating musical identities and overcoming cultural boundaries in Australian music education. British Journal of Music Education, 32(1), 71–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265051714000394
Elliott, D. J., & Silverman, M. (2015). Music Matters. A philosophy of music education (Second Edition). Oxford University Press.
Fuller, B. A. (2022a). Are Teachers Still the Problem? An Analysis of the NSW Education What Works Best Documents. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 47(8). https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2022v47n8.6
Fuller, B. A. (2022b). Is what works best, best for music education? Australian Journal of Music Education, 54(2), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.839670548750181
Hallam, S., & Himonides, E. (2022). The Power of Music: An Exploration of the Evidence. Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0292
Hocking, R. (2023). Fading Notes: The State of Music Education for the Next Generation of Primary Teachers. Alberts I The Tony Foundation. https://www.alberts.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Music-Education-ITE-Report_A4_130623.pdf
Humberstone, J. H. B. (2023). Battle Dances and 808s: Teaching music creation in Australia. In M. Fautley, K. Devenay, J. Grow, & A. Ziegenmeyer (Eds.), International perspectives on teaching music composition in schools. Routledge.
Kallio, A. A. (2017). Popular Outsiders: The Censorship of Popular Music in School Music Education. Popular Music and Society, 40(3), 330–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2017.1295213
Lamont, A. (2011). The beat goes on: Music education, identity and lifelong learning. Music Education Research, 13(4), 369–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2011.638505
Lamont, A., & Maton, K. (2010). Unpopular Music: Beliefs and Behaviours towards Music in Education. In R. Wright (Ed.), Sociology and Music Education (pp. 63–80). Ashgate.
Lewis, S., & Hogan, A. (2019). Reform first and ask questions later? The implications of (fast) schooling policy and ‘silver bullet’ solutions. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1219961
Pring, Richard., & Thomas, G. (2004). Evidence-based practice in education. Open University Press.
Rose, L. S., & Countryman, J. (2013). Repositioning ‘The Elements’: How Students Talk about Music. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 12(3), 20–20.
Sahlberg, P. (2021). Finnish lessons 3.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?(Third edition.). Teachers College Press.
Sahlberg, P. (2023). Trends in global education reform since the 1990 s: Looking for the right way. International Journal of Educational Development, 98, 102748. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2023.102748
Stacey, M. (2017). The teacher ‘problem’: An analysis of the NSW education policy Great Teaching, Inspired Learning. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(5), 782–793. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1168778
van der Schyff, D., Schiavio, A., & Elliott, D. J. (2022). Musical Bodies, Musical Minds. Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality. The MIT Press.
