Students’ perspectives in a collaborative composition project at a Spanish secondary school

Abstract

Although music was established as a compulsory subject in Spain by the 1990 constructivist reform, the 2002 counter-reform restricted it to lists of concepts, in a renewed encyclopaedist model for secondary schools that ignored authentic musical procedures, such as performing or composing. Contemporary adolescents, accustomed to the transmission of information through multimedia technologies, rejected this model, as well as common teaching strategies based on memorising verbal data about music and on guided listening. Since adolescents’ refusal to learn, as in other subjects, might end in school dropout, this study sought to understand the significance a group of students attributed to learning when they were challenged with an aesthetic problem whose open solutions they had to find collaboratively, and to understand the characteristics of the collaboration.