Negotiating Learning and Teaching in a Music Technology Lab: Curricular, Pedagogical, and Ecological Issues

Abstract

This study investigated the lived experiences of a group of students and their teacher as they negotiated learning and teaching during a sixth-grade exploratory music technology course taught in a music technology lab. Taking a qualitative and naturalistic approach, I sought to understand the challenges, issues, and successes experienced by the students and their teacher as they collectively negotiated the curricular, pedagogical, and ecological dimensions of their experiences throughout a 10-week course that was part of the students' regular school curriculum. As researcher, I implemented a multifaceted data collection and analysis strategy using techniques drawn from ethnography (Wolcott, 1997), hermeneutic phenomenology (van Manen, 1990), and intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995). Date were collected in the form of field notes, observations, multiple video and audio recordings, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and classroom artifacts such as worksheets and computer files. Using narrative techniques in the write-up of the study (Barone, 2000), I presented the tensions experienced by the students, teacher, and researcher through their own voices. Emergent as important to learning and teaching throughout the study were a series of dualistic thematic tensions. The tensions between formal learning and informal learning and between teacher control and learner agency emerged as most important. However, subsumed beneath these tensions were additional tensions between experiences that focused on isolated skills vs. creative experiences, a view of music as something to be endured vs. for expression, a vision of learning as "banking" (Friere, 1970) vs. learning as constructing (Bruner, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978), and the perspective of the learner as individual vs. the learner as social. Using a metaphor of a "river of experience" (Burnard, 2000), I share and discuss the emergent tensions as they played out in both the prior musical and educational experiences of the teacher and in the negotiated learning experiences of the students in this study. An overarching tension between balancing tradition and innovation underpinned the teacher's pedagogical and curricular decision making during the study. This tension illustrates deep connections between the nature of the teacher's prior musical and educational experiences and the pedagogical, curricular, and ecological decisions made in the classroom.