Research

I am an emerging researcher, or perhaps what is commonly referred to as an early-career researcher.  I recently completed my Master of Education at the University of Melbourne, submitting a 30,000 word thesis that looked at the way newly-arrived children perceive music learning and music making. I’ve been publishing papers and presenting at conferences for the last couple of years.

My current interests are focused around

• refugee and newly-arrived (immigrant) children, and the way that music can impact upon their learning and well-being in different ways (eg. development of language, literacy, social connectedness).
• I am also digging into the pedagogies of teaching artists, starting with my own, and this currently includes efforts to track the way I adjust my pedagogy between the highly-developed creative minds of the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble performers, and the students I teach at the Melbourne English Language School  and Pelican Primary School, who have had far less exposure to the arts, and considerable lanugage barriers to their learning.
• Following on from this, I am mapping the pedagogy I have developed specifically for use in ESL environments, and the way I develop a musically-rich environment that encourages implicit learning of concepts, and avoids verbal explanations wherever possible.

The parallels between research and collaboratively-devised artmaking were inspiring and reassuring for me, especially as I had quite a lot of experience in the latter when I embarked upon the former. The importance of remaining open to the data… of not imposing outcomes while still in the process of discovery, instead, allowing the narrative to reveal itself in its own time… of asking questions and posing hypotheticals and probing the data and implied relationships rigorously… all this made great sense to me, and indeed, offered further reassurance to the process I had always undertaken in my artistic collaborations.

(Lastly, if you’ve arrived at this page following a link in one of the blog posts, you might be looking for one of my older pages, now deleted. I’m gradually updating the links – apologies for the broken ones).