James Humberstone’s blog
My podcast, Music Zettel, is also hosted through this blog. You can listen to it here by filtering the Podcast category, or you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, or TuneIn.
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New Unit of Work planners for Stage 5, NSW Music 7-10 2024 Syllabus
At the moment I’m busy re-working some of my best high school units of work for the new NSW 7-10 Music syllabus (2024). While it isn’t due to be implemented for another year, the Department of Education as announced that teachers can start teaching it from this year if they wish, so here at the… Read more
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Do the recommendations in the Initial Teacher Education report, “Strong Beginnings”, offer any benefits for the music education of Australian children?
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… Read more
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Advocating for music education today – can we stay together?
We have many wonderful music education experts here in Australia, and around the world, who each advocate for music education in their own way. You might think that such advocacy would be applauded by all who work in music education, especially when we seem to be agreed that the importance of the arts is diminished… Read more
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The first drafts of the new NSW HSC Music courses are coming, and they’re not great
I think that might be the first made-up click-baity title I’ve written since I called my 2016 TEDxOxford talk “The Science of Dubstep”. The latter was actually an advocacy piece for progressive music education, and I like to think quite a good one, but of course it got hated on by the Dubstep crowd, and… Read more
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NESA’s new Music 7-10 syllabus will contribute to teacher workload and burnout
There was a piece called “Teacher burnout fuelling national shortages” on the ABC’s Radio National this morning. The federal government reports that there will be a shortage of 4,000 teachers by the end of next year (honestly, I thought it was already higher than that), and that the main contributing factor is high workload resulting… Read more