The canon or the kids: teachers and the recontextualisation of classical and popular music in the secondary school curriculum

• Main Author: McPhail, Graham John
• Other Authors: Rata, Elizabeth
• Published: ResearchSpace@Auckland 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2292/18361

The purpose of this study was to investigate and explain the ways in which six secondary school music teachers manage the relationship between classical and popular music in their elective teaching programmes. The focus of this research was on the teachers and the influences on their curriculum decision making. Within a wider cultural context dominated by aesthetic relativism there are tremendous challenges and responsibilities for teachers as they act as recontextualising agents in the pedagogic recontextualising field (Bernstein, 2000). Their stories are a rich source of data concerning the values and knowledge they hold as important. Each case provides valuable insights into the influences and processes of music teaching in New Zealand secondary schools, as well as shedding light on the views of students. This research establishes that the participant teachers identify and utilise popular and classical music as distinct but interrelated forms of knowledge. The central issue is not so much a contestation between styles of music, but the accommodation of a tension between types of knowledge and ways of knowing strongly associated with each style of music - socially acquired informal knowledge and disciplinary knowledge. Teachers legitimate popular music by including it in the curriculum but also by recontextualising practices and knowledge associated with this style to enhance its conceptual reach for the educational context. A key factor in teacher effectiveness therefore is the degree to which links between informal and formal knowledge can be created so that students' understanding and conceptual abilities can be extended across music knowledge boundaries. A significant finding is that the teacher's role is pivotal. It is teachers' knowledge that is significant in maintaining the epistemic integrity of a subject which is strongly 'horizontal' - that is, susceptible to socio-cultural influences. Knowledge displacement brought about by the move to generic curriculum documents increasingly places the responsibility on teachers to manage and balance both the epistemic and social demands of curriculum conception and realisation. Teachers' values, decisions, and actions are pivotal to music education as they interpret and assimilate a multitude of influences with a high degree of autonomy. The questions of what knowledge should be taught, how it should be taught, and how teachers can be effective are all considered in this research and have relevance to the wider field of education.