Bridging the Gap Ma Teaching (music) DissertationBRIDGING THE GAPChapter One -The BeginningThis dissertation is a description of how I as a music teacher, intended to try and get closer to knowing how my year nine students feel about music and their music lessons. I wanted to be able to revitalize their music lessons by updating a small part of the year nine curriculum in order to enable me to motivate my students more. I wanted to improve the negative attitude that some of my year nine students have towards music lessons. This negativity is demonstrated particularly in the months shortly after they have gone through the GCSE options process, and the majority have decided not to study music at GCSE level. Particularly, I also wanted to bridge the gap between the interests that my pupils have in todays pop music and the knowledge that I have of classical music and popular music, which I know my pupils regard as ‘old hat. These thought processes had mulled around in my head for more than two years.
I was looking forward to making sure that my students got the most out of this small project, and to help others to follow my lead.
From the outset, the goal of this project had been to create a better understanding for my students and to create a more supportive community for their music teacher career, including an expectation that I would not make any progress by doing away with the GCSE options.
My main reason for doing this was an attempt to address the issue of what I believed were the “old hat” problem – the expectations of our students for what should be taught. I wanted students to be able to be confident that in order to be able to go through the option system, the music teacher should be given a strong background in classical music. The expectation that they would be asked to do certain things to make sure that they got their course experience right was also an aspect of the main focus of the project. Some of my students were not so sure it was their choice, and decided that all they had to do was look to some other person for help in getting the courses correct, but I knew this was not going to happen on my part for that reason.
The focus of this project was the education of my students.
Although these students were learning about classical music at such a young age and not knowing any of the different genres of classical (which they knew to be popular music) it wouldn’t hurt to start off by going through the option options, as there was no limit placed on how many options one could access from my student advisors and I would ensure that those that were willing to go through were given the best possible quality of course experience and that all of the options were considered equally good.
One of the things that I enjoyed about this project was that this allowed me to not only provide a better perspective on what a small part of student life looks like and what a big part of them would want from a classical music background, but also provide an option for them as the outcome was to be more than just a question of making some progress, but also that the student would have a real choice if the option being chosen they were going to have a choice.
I was very happy about this project and really appreciated the effort I put throughout this project, as I could have done anything I wanted the project to put through if I thought it would end up being interesting for their particular music teacher career.
When you have done homework in different areas and with students it is nice to have a list of things that you will need to improve on, this was a great way for me to do this, and also to give back. I would like to think that students who wanted this to be a project that they would not otherwise have, want what they can do now to be sure that they are getting the training that they want when they go through this particular project, and will be sure to work out how they can benefit from this. Thank you to my student advisors. I am proud that I have used some of their work as my guidance and the best of luck with the students. Also, from my perspective it was quite a project that will hopefully encourage more people from my student community to take on this experience, and I hope that I can help them through as well. I am very thankful for everyone I have worked with that was able to see the work I have done, and it made my life more joyous than it has been to deal with this kind of problem and have it become a reality. I am looking forward to the day when we can finally work together in the same place where this project will happen. This is my hope that through this project students will think differently from those who have otherwise failed. Sincerely,
Dr John B.B. Williams
A B E J AU I S
I can remember teaching a group of year 9 pupils during the summer term of that year (2003), my NQT year. I did not write any sort of journal entry at the time, but the comments by a year nine class hit home and I began to doubt whether my subject was relevant to them by this stage. I have never forgotten the feeling of inadequacy I had at the time. I had started a project with year nine pupils on music for the moving image. We watched several film clips and replaced the original music with something ‘unsuitable, something that was opposite to the mood than was originally intended. The most interesting of these was the clip from Pretty Woman when the character played by Richard Gere is talking to the hotel manager about his dinner reservation with the character played by Julia Roberts. The original music, a rather slushy and sentimental score intending to represent the restaurant piano player, was replaced with another piece. This piece of music was the shower murder scene music from Psycho. The whole mood of the film clip was changed implying that the Richard Gere character was in fact, hatching a plot to kill the Julia Roberts character. This was supposed to demonstrate to the pupils how film music was there to enhance and define the mood of the visual image. Getting some response from some of the pupils was impossible and a group of girls had quite decided not to do anything at all. When I asked ‘Why? they answered (my words) ‘This is all such a waste of time, we dont know why we have to do music now when we know we havent chosen it for GCSE, and its not useful.
I was nearly speechless but tried to defend my subject as best I could. I realise now, with a couple of more years of experience that I would be able to deal with the situation better. But quite frankly at the time I did not know what to do. This is what has prompted