There is some great discussion surrounding music education on Twitter emanating from the UK that I often engage with. It has been a constant source of reflection and I have gained many ideas and approaches that have found a home in my classroom in Australia. Recently, I noticed that the Music Teachers Association (MTA) have launched a curriculum-themed blogging project. A series of articles from the British Journal of Music Education (BJME), curated by Dr Steven Berryman, Dr Ally Daubney and Dr Martin Fautley, are assigned weekly, and teachers reflect and respond in what becomes a collective blog. It is a fantastic initiative that encourages reflection on practice and promotes critical engagement with research. The most recent article was Keith Swanwick’s The ‘good enough’ music teacher. A few years prior, this very article (and more broadly Swanwick’s contribution to the literature) so heavily influenced my own doctoral studies and subsequent practice – I just had to revisit it. Below is my reflection for the MTA blog series (the link to the full article and others’ contributions are at the end of this post). My thanks to Dr Berryman, Dr Daubney and Dr Fautley for initiating this discussion.
Despite the intentions and efforts of many teachers and curriculum designers concerned with the provision of meaningful school music education, traditions and cultural conservatism have remained firmly embedded. School music education is too often an ‘island’, inhabited by well-meaning ‘natives’ intent on preserving their culture, identity and values (whatever they may be). It is an understandable position, but one that may easily stagnate and even sow generational discontent. I am in no way dismissive of the intent, and in many cases value, of these cultural offerings, though the following extract from John Donne’s ‘Devotions on Emergent Occasions’ perhaps provides something for us to consider:
‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…’
If we position school music education as an ‘island’, it quickly begins to serve those on that island and that island alone. This is not necessarily a bad thing; that is, until it is seen as the only place where ‘music proper’ is found; an island entire of itself. Offerings from the ‘main’ may be dismissed or seen as lesser in value, but in this we only diminish their potentially rich contribution and continued influence in our own spaces.
I fear I have stretched the analogy a little too far, but fundamentally Swanwick argues that we value and embrace the potential contributions of each ‘island’ as part of the ‘main’. The care for music as a living form of human discourse, the care for the discourse of others, and the promotion of fluency in meaningful exchange, offer a common foundation for all musical interactions, and the tapestry of different dialects only serves to enrich and inform localised models.
The ‘good enough’ teacher recognises not only this, but also that they themselves are a potential ‘island’. To resort to another analogy, they realise that it ‘takes a village to raise a child’ (perhaps on the ‘main’?). They respect that others can complement and even supplement the journey for the learner and humbly accept that it is not their sole responsibility; they place students in front of multiple teachers, musicians, significant others and experiences to enrich and extend; their actions transcend unhelpful categorisations of music learning; they simply ‘teach music musically’…
School music teachers are but one part of a student’s musical journey; those ‘good enough’ offer a significant influence that connect any ‘islands’ to the ‘main’. As Donne warns, if we continue work on (or as) an ‘island’, or we discount the influence of others, we diminish the potential richness of educative interaction for our students:
‘…if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’
The ‘good enough’ teacher works to keep the potential influence of the ‘main’ whole and in doing so the richness of musical discourse alive.
That was the lens I used when re-engaging with this paper – perhaps a slight step-aside, but the use of the ‘good enough’ phrase is something that has resonated with me of late.
The blog post containing all of the contributions can be found here. Enjoy reading each one, and perhaps consider adding to the next one – contribute here.
Dr Cade Bonar 