My fifth anniversary

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Music Work blog. I started writing it in 2007 as part of my Master of Education  – the blog served as a reflective practice journal where I could start to unpack all the complexities of music making in the school for recently-arrived immigrants and refugees where I was a visiting artist and that was the site for my research. Here’s a link to my first ever post:

Update on the language school project

I soon found that putting my thoughts and ideas into writing was somewhat addictive. I loved the great sense of satisfaction and calm I often felt after writing a post – as if I’d taken a messy, tangled set of thoughts and organised them into more orderly strands of ideas. Working out how to express my thoughts in writing – especially about my music-making process in the classroom which was something I’d developed through many years of experience, rather than learned directly from another – preoccupied me a lot in that first year.

These days, I love the way my blog has connected me with other writers, researchers, musicians and teachers around the world. It’s still a hugely satisfying outlet for ideas and reflections.

My most popular posts:

This one describing the stick-passing game, which includes some additional information contributed by my dear friend and colleague Eugene Skeef (who taught me the game in the first place)

This one, the “workshop plan for finding bright, sparky kids” that I use to kick off the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble program at the start of each year

This one, about the Australian tenor, Christopher Saunders (be sure to read through the comments – I am not the only person who has heard him sing and was blown away)

This post, showing some of my photos from Sarajevo in December 2007 always get regular visits. If I’d known how much interest it would attract, I’d have posted many more photos – it was hard to choose just a few! Sarajevo in winter is very photogenic.

Midway through my time with WordPress, they began offering the option to add tags to posts. Prior to that, the only way to add keywords to your posts was to create categories or link the post to existing categories. That’s the reason I have so many categories! However, the categories are still the easiest way to track back through the progress of different projects and ideas over the years.

Thanks to everyone who reads, and especially to those who subscribe and those who leave comments. Your interest and thoughtful responses inspire me to keep sharing these reflections. I’m very privileged to be able to earn a living doing work that I love, and feel lucky to be able to get input into it from other practitioners the world over. Here’s to the next five years!

Talking about Timor Leste

I have a presentation coming up soon, as part of the Arts Education 2011 Colloquium series at the University of Melbourne. If you are in Melbourne, please come along:

Date:         Monday, 1^st August, 2011
Time:         5.15 – 6.45 pm
Venue:      Frank Tate Room, Level 9, 100 Leicester Street, Carlton

Toka Boot [Big Jam]: Four months making music in East Timor

From October 2010 until the end of January 2011, musician Gillian Howell undertook an Asialink artist residency in East Timor [Timor Leste]. This presentation describes – through words, pictures and video– the fruits of that residency, and some of the challenges that arose. From a concert for Human Rights Day in Baucau, to informal jams with children on the veranda of her house, to workshops in kindergartens, language classes, and remote mountain villages, Gillian’s experiences revealed much about what it can be to be a musician within a community.

Gillian’s experiences also reveal the complexity of being an outsider in Timorese society. She considers this with reference to Timor Leste’s legacies of centuries of European colonialism, brutal years of occupation, times of conflict and times of fragile peace and UN Administration, and how this history has influenced Timorese interactions with malae [foreigners].

This was not a research project, but a documented music residency in a remote community. Gillian reflects on her experiences as a practitioner working in this somewhat isolated environment, with descriptions drawn from her online journal (http://musicwork.wordpress.com), illustrated by films and photographs taken during the residency.

(Not) making plans

Timor is, I suspect, a place where projects automatically have an emergent design, because there are so many unknown variables that can disrupt the best-laid plans. It seems wise to keep things somewhat fluid and be ready to recognise and respond to opportunities for interesting exchanges as and when they arise.

Despite knowing this and being perfectly comfortable with it (I am an improviser, after all), I can’t help but imagine possible projects that I’d like to develop. Everytime I talk with someone about the residency, or I read another chapter in one of the many books that have been lent to me by old Timor hands, or I imagine the residency based on the things people have told me about the country, I start to imagine projects – big, small, new music, traditional music…

Getting ready for Timor

I’ll soon be going away again. I’ve been awarded an Asialink Artist Residency for 2010, which is a program that places Australian artists in residence in different Asian countries. I nominated East Timor (Timor-Leste is its official name) as my preferred destination and I’ll be spending the months of October through to January there. The countdown to my departure has begun.

Asialink residencies focus on the opportunities for cultural exchange and lasting links that the residencies create, and the professional development of the artists. It’s a time to be present, and respond to the new environment and people around you, for uninterrupted, unlimited creativity. You are matched up with – or you nominate , which was my approach – a local host organisation whose work and aims hold some affinity with your own. Together you consider the possibilities that the residency might offer both parties, and make your plans that way. My host organisation is a young NGO, Many Hands International,  focused on community development through cultural activity who are based in the of Lospalos in the east of East Timor. Their current focus is on building a centre for traditional and contemporary arts and culture in Lospalos and my residency will form part of their work.

Teaching to suit the needs of learners

A theme that emerged in both the CMA and Main ISME conferences was that of the need to modify the way we teach, or the way teaching and learning processes and systems can be extended/adjusted to respond to the needs of particular student cohorts. It probably emerged as a theme for me because my two presentations fitted within this area – I’ve been researching the particular needs and perceptions of newly-arrived children (refugees and immigrants) in a transitional English Language-focus school, and the way that I’ve adjusted my teaching approach to better meet their needs.

The paper I presented at CMA looked at issues of understanding and meaning that can arise in creative work with young new arrivals when English language skills are minimal, or not present. There are lots of ways students can participate in music lessons, but we are engaging in creative (composition) work, inventing and suggesting ideas, I wanted to explore how much the students could make sense of the processes we were using. At the ISME main conference I focused on the specific ways I have changed my creative music pedagogy to allow for greater transfer of information through non-verbal, environmental scaffolds and means.

In Ireland, the Traveller community is a minority group with a strong musical culture of their own, and their music traditions played an important role in the oral music tradition of Ireland, sharing and preserving songs from all around the country over the centuries. The formal education system does not sufficiently support Traveller students (if their under-representation in middle and higher learning institutions is taken as evidence). Travellers could be described ‘non-traditional learners’. Julie Tiernan, a CMA delegate from Ireland, presented detailed description of an access course designed for Traveller students, using what she called a “blended learning” process at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. It utilised online learning and contact, phone and face to face contact, skype tutorials, immersion weekends, reflective journals and CD-Rom lectures. The delivery of the course content was flexible so that students could work at their own pace, however – equally importantly – there was ongoing support and encouragement for students from staff  who pushed them to stay on track and expect great results from themselves. It’s an inspired example of the level of detail universities and other formal learning institutions can go to if they are serious about addressing issues of access for minority groups or ‘non-traditional learners’.

At the ISME main conference, Sophia Aggelidou from Greece described the perceptions that Roma students in a remote encampment/town outside Thessaloniki have of music learning in school. She stated at the outset that Roma children are missing out in the Greek education system. At this particular school, 75% of the children are Roma, with the remaining 25% being a mixture of immigrants and local people. The town is not easy to access, and is known colloquially (and perhaps disparagingly as “the gypsy town”). The school is dilapidated and uncared-for. Different music teachers have taught there, but only ever for a year at a time before being moved on (at least on two occasions, the transfer to another school was against the teacher’s wishes). There was no music teacher there at the time of the research.

The research investigated the musical lives of the Roma children, and what their musical realities are. It revealed that they feel a strong connection to music in their lives, but that music in school leaves them cold. They enjoy pop, rock and hip-hop, but it is the artists from their own culture (heard in the home environment) that they identify with most strongly. They want to learn music, to learn to play an instrument. They are highly engaged by creative, alternative ways of learning, including hands-on tasks and collaborative processes. However, the more formal teaching and learning processes that are more common in this school do not engage them, and there is a high drop-out rate. In the family community there is little schooling or literacy among adults. However, Roma students consistently enrol in primary school – indicating that schooling and education is something that they do see as important and valuable. The speaker felt that their perceptions of music learning would correlate to their perceptions of school in general – they are ready to learn, but need processes and pedagogies that are tailored to their strengths and abilities.

I attended a workshop presented by a Norwegian delegate who has been working for many years in a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon. Professor Vegar Storsve presented a project that delivers music education among refugees, with the involvement of pre-service teachers and musicians. It’s a fantastic program (read more about it in this article) that offers cultural exchange between young adults, older adults, children, teenagers. Skills are taught and shared in all directions, with the Norwegians teaching music and instruments from their culture, and the Palestinian musicians returning the gesture in kind. I liked Professor Storsve’s description of the kind of musical score they have developed over the years for these projects. In Norwegian it is called a FLERBRUKSARRANGEMENT – meaning multi-function score, and it is the same kind of score that I develop for the Jams I lead for families at Federation Square throughout the year. It’s music that has many possible lines, adapted to suit the abilities of the project participants. One- or two-note parts, ostinato parts, chord progression parts, more complex lines, and opportunities for improvised solos. Everything is learned by ear, and everyone learns more than one part. All the learning takes place in one room – a wonderful (if challenging) cacophony of intensity and concentration.

As creative teachers, we know the importance of adjusting and adapting content within the flow of the lesson, in response to the way our students are engaging with the material. However, the many pressures that exist within the school system – to produce measurable results, the emphasis on standardised testing, the ever-crowded curriculum, the trends that see things like music and arts being squeezed out of the curriculum or forced to compromise their ideals in order to give everyone a turn – mean that there is not always the capacity to respond to the different needs in a single class, especially when there is a huge difference of need and learning style preference among the cohort.

Perhaps community musicians are better placed to respond to these needs and preferences, as they frequently work outside the mainstream, and frequently with people who are themselves somewhat on the fringes of mainstream society. The particular needs that were described in my papers about new arrivals, Julie’s work in Ireland with Travellers, and the Roma students in Greece would all perhaps be met by the “creative practitioners” described in Galton’s 2006 study into the pedagogies of creative practitioners in schools (a must-read). Are schools always the best place for engaged, committed learning by students?

Banner count = 5

The ISME Community Music Activity Commission Seminar in Hangzhou was adorned with banners. We were greeted with banners at the hotel entrance:

 

Above the Registration Table in the foyer:

 

As a backdrop to the presentation space, which resembled a press conference on the first morning, as dignity after dignity gave a concise, celebratory speech about the Seminar and its significance and importance (I am still to source a photo of that particular event – I was too gob-smacked to think to photograph it myself. the one below is from Day Three of the Commission Seminar):

 

At the Welcome Banquet that was put on for us at the end of the first day of proceedings. This banner was particularly mind boggling as it was absolutely enormous. Containing the seminar logo and the words ‘Welcome Banquet’, it was clearly a single use banner. It served as a backdrop to the array of performing ensembles that graced the stage throughout the banquet evening. Again, I was too overwhelmed to remember to take photos – I will add this one when I get an image from someone else.

 We paid a visit to the local Community College, an excursion that lasted all of 20 minutes, but there was a large banner welcoming us to this place too. That one was up very high:

 

Five banners! All for us – a group of about 40 delegates from around the world. It was extraordinary – but also a demonstration of respect and honour, I guess, and for that I think we were all quite humbled.

 Indeed, we were hosted with such great consideration and care by our hosts the Open University of China and the local community college. The hotel where we stayed and where the conference was held was five-star and grand. In the conference room, we were provided with endless bottles of mineral water, and “bottomless green tea” which the staff would pour for us at regular intervals. Even better, each seating place included a rolled-up, cool damp flannel. Morning and afternoon tea included fruit, cakes, juice, tea and coffee, and the Hotel Buffet for breakfast, lunch and dinner included some freshly-cooked, on-request items.

 We were each met at the airport or railway station by a volunteer, and as mine explained to me, their role was to help us in whatever way we need. In my mind I began to push this idea along – were they like a personal assistant? Could I send young David (as he called himself in English) out to get a coffee for me? Probably not, but on the day of our excursion to the famed West Lake of Hangzhou, david came along and took me and some other companions on a different walking route around the lake, to the protestations of the main tour guide. And he helped me buy a silk scarf, bargaining the price down to half the original quoted price. I really appreciated his help and company – he was friendly and helpful, and very smart. Thank you David, if you are reading this.

 I’m sure we would all have been equally happy with less support if that had been what was offered (and as community musicians, that is probably what most of us are accustomed too!). But I loved that every trouble was taken to create a smoothly-flowing conference in which all our energy and attention could be turned to the papers and ideas themselves, because every other concern had been taken care of.

 Hangzhou is the main centre for silk production and garments in China, and each of us received a gift in our seminar showbags of a beautiful silk scarf. It was of very high quality – the fabric was soft and supple, the colours vibrant, and the edges hand-finished. This is how I wore it on the day of my presentation:

Conceptualising learning – some new terms

From January 11-13 I attended the Cultural Diversity in Music Education conference in Sydney. It was an interesting conference, with a big range of workshops to participate in (Papua New Guinean log drumming, anyone? Balinese gamelan? Freedom songs from Pretoria?), papers to listen to, and some interesting plenary sessions that got everyone talking.

I presented my paper on some of the methodological challenges that I identified in conducting interviews with newly-arrived children – things like the kinds of questions you ask, things to consider when interpreting their responses, ambiguities that arise when you are working with interpreters, creative interviewing techniques and tools, etc.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that one of my early research ‘discoveries’ (for want of a better word) was a kind of map of the way that newly-arrived children first make sense of their new environment, and then work within it. I saw the way that within every aspect of schooling (from making sense of school cultural rules, to discipline-based learning like music or English) the children followed the same pattern or stages of learning:

Level 1 – where everything is learned by copying. The children don’t necessarily understand the intention behind the task, they are simply doing what they see others doing, and so figure out their participation in this way.

Level 2 – where the children begin to understand the intention, purpose and meaning behind the different things they do. They have more moments of illumination, and they begin to conect together previously separate bits of information and experiences.

Level 3 – they understand both what to do, and why/how to do it to such an extent that they can lead and show others (thus providing the ideal ‘model’ for those students who have just arrived in the country and are at Level 1).

Tony Lewis, an ethnomusicologist at Sydney Uni, hasbeen exploring a similar idea in terms of how music gets learned in different communities. He described his own conundrum when learning first African drumming, and later Papua New Guinean log drumming, where he found that all the local people learned simply by being there. There was no culture of teaching, or explanation – people just watched and listened and joined in as best they could, gradually building proficiency through an aural and visual process. By contrast he knew that for himself, as someone with a lot of formal musical training and ability to make quite detailed ‘maps’ of rhythms and sounds, the more he engaged those faculties developed through prior training and knowledge, the faster and more efficiently he would be able to make sense of the new musical language he was studying.

Children’s rights, and children participating

2009 is the 20 year anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRoC), and celebrate this, the University of Melbourne held an interdisciplinary half-day conference on Moving the Children’s Rights Agenda Forward.

My interest in this area has several strands. Firstly, my arts practice is a participatory one, in particular directing collaborations between professional musicians and young people, and in bringing children’s musical ideas and voices into the foreground of music-making. Secondly, my recently-completed Masters research was focused on the perceptions and thoughts of newly-arrived immigrant and refugee children, and their responses to music-learning in Australia. (You can read about my research in a little more detail here).

Thus, the skills involved in drawing out children’s voices and ideas, and the issues surrounding ethical use of their voice, and the arguments for (and against) this, have been areas of focus for me, which has drawn me into the larger arena of children’s rights in many different contexts.

Children’s rights, as enshrined in the UNCRoC, are a balance between freedom (autonomy rights) and protective rights (the right to protection, and acknowledgement of their vulnerability). Margaret Coady, in giving a historical overview, described early critics of the Declaration (1959) and subsequent Convention (1989), in particular the child liberationists (including such eminent scholars as John Holt), who objected to the UNCRoC becuase it was protective, and took away rights from children. (Book to read: Escape from Childhood by John Holt).

The rights of children to be heard in matters which affect them (for example, matters before the courts) have been hard-won (if they could be considered ‘won’ in the current times. Perhaps it is more accurate to say “gradually gaining tiny footholds and prominence in the minds of a growing number of decision-makers”…). Article 12 of the CRoC is concerned with the child’s right to express views, and for these views to be given appropriate weight according to the age and capacity of the child. How this is interpreted in different fields, and in different countries (compare, for example, Noway, Germany and New Zealand with Australia or the UK) can vary quite a lot.

The children’s righs movement has been growing steadily, but ironically, is in danger of being dominated by adults.

Coady finished with a reminder about autonomy – adult or child autonomy. Quoting Kymlicka, she said, “No lives go better being led from the outside according to values the person doesn’t endorse…” Humans live their lives from the inside, according to their understandings of what makes life valuable. This is true for people of any age. Children, like adults, are constantly forming their understanding of what makes life valuable for them.

Current writing and thinking

I’ve been writing papers this week – one that I’m submitting to the next ISME conference in Beijing (ISME being the International Society for Music Education) and one for the CDIME (Cultural Diversity in Music Education) conference, taking place in Sydney in January 2010. Both papers are drawn from my Masters research and thesis.

For ISME, I’ve written about the pedagogical approach I have developed for work with children who understand very little English. I have drawn a lot on my blog posts over the years in writing about my approach – this blog is often the place where I first start to try and describe things that I am trying, or revelations I am having. In the paper I describe the kind of teaching language I use (very pared-back and minimal), the importance of visual cues and other environmental scaffolds, and the way the project-based approach supports student learning and understanding.

For CDIME my paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise when doing research with children from non-English-speaking backgrounds. It was quite a surprise to me that there was so little published guidance on conducting interviews with children via interpreters, for example. First there are the issues in the way the interpreters understand the research, and the questions you are asking. For example, I wanted some of my questions to be fairly ambiguous in the language they used, in order to elicit ‘pure’ or uncontaminated responses from the children. How easy were these ambiguous questions to translate? How easy is it to talk about music if you are not used to talking about music? (I think musicians learn to talk about music over many years. This is not a debate about music-specific terminology, rather, a discussion about the intangible nature ofmusic that means we can’t point towards things that are difficult to label).

Other things arose too, such as the additional interpretive layers that arose through the additional voices; also, questions about social and cultural conditioning were present. Interactions between adults and children vary between different cultures. How much were these expectations a source of confusion for the children being interviewed? In some cultures children would rarely be asked by an adult for their opinion. Was it therefore awkward for them to respond to my more personal or hypothetical questions?

And so on. Very interesting stuff for me. Anyway, I got both papers finished last night, in time for the deadline. I have one more to write, which will be more concerned with the children’s perceptions of what they are learning and doing in music lessons at the Language School. In particular, do they know they’re composing and inventing material? Who knows, if so? And for those that are still trying to make sense of the whole school environment, what do they think is going on?

That final paper is due at the end of October.

Celebration at long last

I handed in my Masters thesis on July 23rd, but Saturday night just past was the night of my celebratory ‘handing-in’ party. It was Tiny who held things up – this was his first gig-free Saturday night since I handed the thesis in.

Parties are the best way I know for gathering all your dearest and most interesting friends together in a room. I have such a fabulous group of friends, all interesting and engaging in different ways. Lots of arty folks, lots of teachers, lots like me who straddle the two worlds. Family came along as well, and friends from my Italian classes, who I see every week and am therefore more up to date with than the friends I have known for years!

Tiny very kindly agreed to hold the party in his groovy bachelor pad-warehouse apartment just down the road from my little shoebox apartment. Saturday night was one balmy night, so everyone was there in the summer clothes and it really felt like winter has shifted along and spring has truly started.

Thanks to everyone who came along for making it such a fun night. A couple of people brought me flowers which now adorn my living room, along with an ‘award’ for my fine achievement in completing my Masters – here is a photo.