Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy

This pioneering book reveals how the music classroom can draw upon the world of popular musicians' informal learning practices, so as to recognize and foster a range of musical skills and knowledge that have long been overlooked within music education. It investigates how far informal learning practices are possible and desirable in a classroom context; how they can affect young teenagers' musical skill and knowledge acquisition.

Cover -- Half Title -- Dedication -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- General Editor's preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- The aims and rationale of this book -- Background research: how popular musicians learn -- The underlying principles of the project -- The project in historical perspective -- Research methods -- The beginning, and the ends, of the project -- 2 The project's pedagogy and curriculum content -- Stages 1-7: overall pedagogy and content -- Teachers' initial responses and the apparent conflict with official approaches -- The role of the teacher: an overview -- The start of Stage 1: chaos, its aftermath and the questions it raised -- 3 Making music -- Social distinction and the emergence of 'natural music learning practices' -- Listening, choosing and beginning to copy: an example from the first lesson -- Listening and choosing the song -- Singing -- A note on the availability of instruments in the classrooms -- Playing untuned percussion -- Finding pitches on instruments -- Progression: getting worse before you get better -- The authority of the CD as distinct from the authority of the teacher -- 'Flow' and 'play' -- 'Feel' and 'musicking' -- A note on musical composition, improvisation and creativity -- What counts as learning in music-making? Pupils' and teachers' views of the learning outcomes -- 4 Listening and appreciation -- Pupils' musical vocabulary -- Pupils' aural approaches to the task: purposive listening -- The further development of pupils' listening capacities -- Listening beyond the project -- Music appreciation -- The progression of listening and appreciation through Stages 1-5 -- Music appreciation and the development of 'critical musicality' -- Teachers' views on listening -- Listening, musical meaning and experience in the classroom.