Abstract
Instrumental and vocal teachers often employ their body in teaching to facilitate sensorimotor engagement with the voice or an instrument. Yet, teacher’s bodily engagement in instrumental and vocal education is scarcely addressed in music educational research studies. In our view, this scarcity is related to the lack of a framework about the role of the music teacher’s body in instrumental and vocal education. In this article, we will adopt a dynamical systems theory perspective to set first steps in conceptualizing the role of the instrumental and vocal teacher’s body in teaching and learning music. From this perspective, learning processes are viewed as emerging from the learner’s goal-oriented, situated, adaptive actions in the learning environment. Teachers play a significant role in that environment, due to the different types of constraints (e.g. environmental and task constraints) they can introduce to aid learners in finding a solution for a musical task. In this article, we argue that different types of teacher’s bodily engagement can act as constraints in instrumental and vocal music learning, thereby facilitating the learning process in non-verbal ways. To demonstrate this, we describe four types of bodily involvement: physical modelling, action demonstration, pedagogical gestures and touch. In summary, based on existing theoretical and empirical research, the article will present a first conceptualisation of the role of the music teacher in instrumental and vocal education viewed from a dynamical systems approach.
Highlights
In recent years, insights gained from theoretical and empirical work on the embodied nature of human interaction with music are gradually finding their way into the domain of music education (e.g., Bresler, 2004; Bremmer, 2015; Van der Schyff et al, 2016; Nijs, 2019; Nijs and Bremmer, 2019)
Up till studies on teachers in instrumental and vocal education tend to focus on their verbal communication (Simones et al, 2015), demonstrating that language can play a constructive role in music teaching (e.g., Meissner and Timmers, 2019), and has its drawbacks
Offering an alternative to representational or computational theories of cognition, this theory has become influential in domains that relate to the topic of embodiment in music education, such as musicology (e.g., Demos et al, 2014; Van der Schyff et al, 2018), education (Renshaw et al, 2010; e.g., Koopmans and Stamovlasis, 2016), developmental psychology (e.g., Van Geert and Steenbeek, 2005) and social psychology (e.g., Obhi and Sebanz, 2011; Kyselo and Tschacher, 2014; Vallacher, 2019)
Summary
Insights gained from theoretical and empirical work on the embodied nature of human interaction with music are gradually finding their way into the domain of music education (e.g., Bresler, 2004; Bremmer, 2015; Van der Schyff et al, 2016; Nijs, 2019; Nijs and Bremmer, 2019). Offering an alternative to representational or computational theories of cognition, this theory has become influential in domains that relate to the topic of embodiment in music education, such as musicology (e.g., Demos et al, 2014; Van der Schyff et al, 2018), education (Renshaw et al, 2010; e.g., Koopmans and Stamovlasis, 2016), developmental psychology (e.g., Van Geert and Steenbeek, 2005) and social psychology (e.g., Obhi and Sebanz, 2011; Kyselo and Tschacher, 2014; Vallacher, 2019) Insights emerging from these domains help to shed light on the dynamic complexity of the educational environment that shapes learning and teaching. We will discuss how physical modeling, gestures and touch can act as constraints in instrumental and vocal music learning, facilitating the learning process in non-verbal ways (Bremmer, 2015; Simones et al, 2017; Zorzal and Lorenzo, 2019)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
