Lucy Green's informal learning music pedagogy

It is estimated the UK accounts for almost 15% of the global music market and around 130,000 recorded jobs. There is, however, little evidence of the scale of the economic value of the conditions supporting informal music, despite its possible contribution to outcomes manifest in the UK music industry. ‘The Space’ is where it all happens – the performance, the workshop, the rehearsal, even the brain. Unfortunately, The Space can often be overlooked in favour of the creative process. The informal sector is characterised by the back rooms of pubs, homes and garages which remain unsuitable and poorly equipped rehearsal spaces. Such spaces do exist - rehearsal & practice rooms which operate on a commercial basis. This MA thesis paper develops a methodology to measure the economy of the informal music economy by collecting data on the turnovers of commercial rehearsal/practice studios in London. Along the way, it characterises support for and the significance of informal music-making.

Despite the fact that Mali is famous for its musical traditions, some of which date back to the 13th century, very little research has been done on the passing down of musical knowledge from one generation to the next. Yet surely this is a key to understanding how these oral musics have survived into the 21st century with such vigour. In this chapter I reflect on how children within specialist Malian musical families (jelis, also known as as griots) acquire musical skills. The chapter draws on many years of research in the region, particularly between 2009 to 2012 when I engaged in a film-based project entitled ‘Growing into music – musical enculturation in oral traditions’.
There is a small but growing ethnomusicological literature documenting aspects of childhood musicality in Africa (see Rice 2003, Campbell & Wiggins 2013), but almost nothing on Mali except for passing comments in Charry (2000). I am inspired by the idea of
‘enskilment’, a term from anthropology, first used by Gísli Pálsson in his study of apprenticeship in Icelandic fishing (Pálsson 1994), and since taken up by others including Tim Ingold (2000) and Trevor Marchand (2010, 2015) writing about the acquisition of artisanal skills. The chapter presents local discourses around music, modes of transmission, the inheritance of talent and how to measure progress. Some of these findings have strong resonances with work on informal learning in the classroom by Lucy Green (2001, 2008), and by providing new data from West Africa, I hope to stimulate further scholarship on this topic.

For many teenagers, learning to play guitar might only involve themselves and one or more of their peers interacting outside school. Music education research, however, does not reveal the spectrum of ways in which adolescent musicians interact to learn peer-to-peer. The purpose of this study was to examine this process: how adolescents verbally and nonverbally communicated to learn music together and without adult teachers.

Two research questions in this study addressed how systems of meanings emerged in adolescent musicians’ processes of talk. The first was: How do participants learning jointly and independently communicate with a peer outside school? The second question was: How do participants assess independent learning along with their peer and joint learning outside school?

The participants were six adolescent guitarists from El Paso, Texas. The final candidates included five males with Hispanic backgrounds and one Mexican-American adolescent male. Data were collected in three observations of the guitarists learning in pairs. Data were also collected in interviews, artifacts, and field notes. Discourse analysis involved review of recorded observations, field notes, and transcripts. Data were coded and parsed into categories. Multiple systems of meanings emerged in themes. Quoted material helped to explain the discourse themes. Three sets of findings included main dialectic discourse themes: together–individual, unreserved–reserved, and established–undetermined. Four identity discourses—self-learner, coach, musical artist, and friend—emerged from participants’ dialogues. Three themes indicated how participants individually assessed learning, and two themes showed how joint evaluations emerged peer-to-peer.

This study and its results highlight a spectrum of ways adolescent musicians use everyday talk to learn music outside school. Findings in this study might empower music teachers to facilitate their students’ own peer dialogues. Future research can build on the foundation of findings here, which raise questions for exploring how communication outside school might compare with communication in school, how peer-to-peer music learning might be facilitated, as well as implications about why certain types of communication influence music learning.

Green's (2008) informal music learning practices have been successfully implemented in many schools in the UK and in other countries, including Brazil. Her model has also raised questions about a different role ascribed to teachers: after setting a task, they stand back and observe their pupils so that they can diagnose their pupils' needs and make appropriate interventions. This allows pupils to be more independent from teachers' instructions, valuing pupils' ideas, peer learning and the development of autonomy. Subscribing to these values but realizing that I have not always been able to implement them in my practice, I decided to adapt Green's model into an e-learning module and research my own practices as a supervisor of that module. Following a self-study action research design, I offered the module three times, each time implementing changes supported by the learning and the knowledge gained from previous experience. The choice of an e-learning setting for this research is due to my previous role as the coordinator of an Initial Music Teacher Education course offered within the Open University of Brazil system, which offers undergraduate courses using a mix of both online and face-to-face interactions. In this sense, I felt the need to investigate this new context of music teacher education and analyse if my practices and my values were attuned to the context of the Open University of Brazil.

This chapter examines music teaching and learning in the wind bands of the philharmonic societies on the island of Corfu. The eighteen philharmonic societies of the island offer music education for free to anyone interested. This mainly attracts children, who usually remain active members of the bands throughout their lives. Wind bands seem to add a great deal to the local cultural identity of the Corfiots and act as local community music centres. It suggests that music teaching, learning and identity within the wind bands of Corfu interact in many ways. Music education needs to be informed and empowered by the way music functions in the community as it may gain considerably when it acts in parity and interchangeably with local musical traditions and practices.

Paper apresentado nos Encontros Regionais Unificados da ABEM 2020. O presente trabalho apresenta os resultados parciais de uma pesquisa em andamento, que visa compreender a obra de Green, em especial How popular musicians learn (2002), do ponto de vista de uma sociologia do conhecimento profissional. Para sua operacionalização, estão sendo utilizados os pressupostos teóricos de dois autores que se dedicam ao currículo e ao conhecimento profissional: Ben Kotzee (2014) e Christopher Winch (2014). Apresento aqui a problematização, uma síntese do quadro teórico, a metodologia e os resultados parciais. Neste último item são relatados os procedimentos em andamento e os produtos já gerados até o presente momento.