Teachers' concepts of musical talent and nurturing musical ability: music learning as exclusive or as opportunity for all?
- Submitting institution
-
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2437219
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/14613808.2014.950559
- Title of journal
- Music Education Research
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 262
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 1469-9893
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The article explores the way in which music teachers’ concepts of musical ability influence their teaching approaches when working with children and young people. The key questions are: how do teachers describe the skills/abilities of highly able pupils, how do they identify them, and how do these two issues influence how they develop and nurture pupils in the classroom?
Data for this paper were gathered through interviews and questionnaires and I spent a great deal of time nurturing relationships with the schools and teachers to ensure high quality data for my study. My participants were both classroom teachers and peripatetic instrumental music instructors. I found that there was a difference between the class teachers’ constructs of ability and the instructors’ constructs: class teachers tended to have a broader concept of ability (and high ability) - what is sometimes called an emergentist view - while the instrumental/vocal instructors tended to have a narrower (or reductionist) view focused on a small number of traits that they deemed significant.
It should be noted that Scotland has a very distinct use of language around learners who are deemed to be gifted or talented, preferring the use of the word highly able, so unpacking this concept in the context of Scotland became very important. The use of the terms gifted and talented caused discomfort to the participants and they naturally refrained from these, choosing more expressive descriptions to understand and recognise their pupils’ abilities.
In light of the COVID pandemic and the contingencies that have been used in education nationally while formal exams have been impossible, the themes of teacher judgement that are highlighted in this paper seem increasingly relevant.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
