Towards pedagogies of creative collaboration: Guiding secondary school students’ music compositions1

Abstract

The pedagogy of creative collaboration in music classrooms is hardly clear from the literature. There are plenty of tips and strategies for setting up composition activities and even some useful models for peer and self-assessment of composition processes. But what about the nature of the interaction between the teacher and the students, and amongst the students themselves, as the composition is unfolding? How can these interactions facilitate the development of the students’ independent musical thinking? And what is the influence of the teacher’s background and musical experience on their approach to facilitating creative collaborations in the classroom? This chapter will explore these matters by first reviewing some literature on this topic and then profiling the case of Emma and her students in a case study of an English secondary class that has composition as part of the music curriculum. For this purpose, I observed Emma’s lessons at key points in the music project to see the different stages of the students’ composition processes and what collaboration can bring to it. Transcripts of student and teacher observations were studied and then summarized for illustration, in the form of vignettes.2 In the discussion, I will suggest approaches that can be used to develop effective creative collaborations between students working in groups, and between the students and the teacher, while preserving the independent musical thinking of the students. In a further section, Emma’s educational and musical background is considered, charting relevant, self-reported, critical incidents in her education and professional path. Links between her pedagogy of creative collaboration and her background are drawn. The chapter closes with some suggestions for building blocks for the design of pedagogies of creative collaboration.