Pedagogic populism vs. opportunities to learn: university music students’ appraisal of their school music classes

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the problem of music student's preparedness for university study. Since 2002 New Zealand senior secondary school students have experienced a national outcomes-based curriculum and assessment system which provides the flexibility for schools and teachers to create curricula suited to varied student interests and learning trajectories. Music teachers are faced with the challenge of fostering engaging musical experiences for students as well as providing the sorts of knowledge for those students who may wish to progress towards specialisation. This paper reports on a small survey of university music students (n = 44) who were asked how well school music prepared them for their university studies. The findings suggest that while democratising the music curriculum in response to the hegemony of past curricula, teachers may have run into another problem where access to the theoretical knowledge required for a successful transition to further study is not always made available to students. It appears that in generally widening access through curricular reforms epistemic access may be unintentionally restricted. I conclude by suggesting that both schools and universities have a responsibility for an approach to education where procedural and principled knowledge are linked as the means towards developing expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• readiness for university
• theoretical knowledge

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Graham McPhail is a senior lecturer in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland. His research work is centred on the role of knowledge in the curriculum, in particular within 21st C schooling and music education contexts. He has is lead editor for NZ's first volume on secondary school music education Educational Change and the Secondary School Music Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand to be published by Routledge in early 2018.

Notes

1. The assessment for the New Zealand NCEA is available at three levels in the final three years of secondary schooling. Students create courses of study derived from modular-type Achievement Standards which describe the key skills to be assessed in various knowledge areas. These include, for example, solo performance, group performance, and composition. See http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/ncea/understanding-ncea/how-ncea-works/.

2. For a fuller examination of the New Zealand music education system, see McPhail, Thorpe, and Wise (forthcoming).

3. I do not simply mean ‘classical theory’ although this may well be part of a students’ ‘required’ knowledge-base but rather consider Sarath’s (2017) ‘process-structure regions’ (110) and curricular grounding in diverse rhythmic, pitch, modal, and tonal languages as a possible structure for approaching theoretical, foundational, and generative music knowledge appropriate in a twenty-first-century context.

4. We need to accept that the university is certainly not the only site of knowledge production that contributes to the discipline's evolving knowledge base.