Music to measure: Symbolic representation in children’s composition

Abstract

Eisner maintains that the arts education community needs empirically grounded examples of artistic related to the nature of the tasks students engage in, the material with which they work, the context's norms and the cues the teachers provide to advance their students' thinking (2000, p. 217). This paper reflects on the results of collaborative action research between teachers and university researchers in New Zealand who have been investigating how children develop and refine their ideas and related skills in music. The paper focuses specifically on the results of action research in which the impact of symbolic representation on idea development and refinement in music is examined. It raises some issues and points of tension for generalist and specialist teachers when fostering creative idea development in music. This paper describes an investigation into how a sample of New Zealand primary school children set out to develop and refine their musical ideas, using symbolic representation (symbols used to represent sounds) as part of the process. Whether the use of these symbols aided or hindered the development of their sound ideas was subsequently examined. The study was part of a more comprehensive project on children's development of ideas in the arts. Development in this sense means the generation, exploration, extension and refinement of arts ideas, where both process and final product are honoured. In this research, three university researchers and 10 generalist primary school teacher-researchers collaborated over two years, to jointly identify and devise aims, methodology, analysis and related action research phases. Such collaboration corroborates a worldwide trend in educational research, which is moving away from research done to teachers towards working with teachers (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004) on questions which teachers identify as important in their practice. The project drew on ethnographic, case study, self-study and action research traditions of educational research. In keeping with naturalistic inquiry, the project recognised that meaning arises out of social situations and is handled through interpretive processes (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2000, p. 138). In the first phase of the project, we investigated what selected, generalist teacher-researchers had been teaching and what children had been learning in each