The conservatory debated from a critical pedagogy perspective

Abstract

Spanish Conservatories of Music are educational institutions where, for the most part, the culture of Modernity is upheld and an aesthetic musical paradigm is enshrined. In this paper, therefore, it was important to reflect, firstly, on the teaching practices they implement and which have remained faithful to Positivist assertions, in the face of the different educational laws that have been passed. To this end, we carried out an analysis of the opinions of 20 students on a university Master’s course which is centred on contemporary artistic practices and where theories sourced from Critical Pedagogy occupy an important space. With the data drawn from these students – all of them Conservatory graduates and a significant number now teachers – we used interpretative phenomenological analysis techniques and the results show this group’s openness towards methodologies and practices hitherto unknown to them. They highlight, moreover, the importance of offering opportunities to awaken a critical approach in students, whereby they can choose what type of teacher they wish to be, and which methodologies they wish to adopt, rather than merely reproducing in an uncritical fashion the teaching style in which they themselves were taught.