Some direction: towards a C21 secondary school curriculum

ABSTRACT

In this third and final paper from the Delphi study One Direction, we report on participants’ responses to four secondary school music curriculum scenarios. These scenarios present four possible directions for a C21 secondary school music curriculum. The scenarios were devised from a combination of ideas derived from the data from the earlier stages of the study (McPhail, G., and J. McNeill. 2019. “One Direction: A Future for Secondary School Music Education?” Music Education Research 21 (4): 359–370; McNeill, J., and G. McPhail. 2020. “One Direction: Strategic challenges for Twenty-first Century Secondary School Music.” Music Education Research 22 (4): 432–446) and the concept of specialisation from Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory. By asking an international panel of leading music education researchers and teachers to respond to the scenarios, we are able to argue that ‘one direction’ is unlikely to emerge for secondary school music education, but we discuss the responses, and the scenario dimensions regarded as most likely and desirable. What appears certain is that there will be a continuing weakening of the boundaries between types of knowledge and stylistic arenas suggesting a dialectic relationship between the legitimating principles most valued.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary school music education
• secondary school music curriculum
• Delphi study
• Legitimation Code Theory
• international survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By generative concepts, we mean concepts that are fundamental to knowledge production in a discipline, e.g. tonality in music, narrative in writing, scientific method in science. In music’s case, knowledge production includes most fundamentally composition and performance, often simultaneously, and then concepts that can be utilised to bring understanding to those fundamental processes such as analysis, historical knowledge, and so on.

2 Powerful knowledge refers to the generative concepts within the discipline or sub-discipline. It does not refer to content or specific musics although powerful knowledge is likely to be exemplified through the most creative or compelling exemplars in a field of production.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham McPhail

Graham McPhail is a senior lecturer in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy, in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He took up this position in 2015 after 20 years of work in the secondary education sector. His research is centred on the role of knowledge in the curriculum, in particular within C21 schooling and music education contexts. He was the lead editor for New Zealand’s first volume on secondary school music education Educational Change and the Secondary School Music Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand published by Routledge in 2018.

Jeff McNeill

Jeff McNeill is Senior Lecturer in Resource & Environmental Planning. He coordinates and lectures environmental management policy and planning to undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with a particular focus on New Zealand. He comes to academia after 23 years as a policy analyst, manager, and consultant in local and central government. He has previously taught secondary school music in New Zealand and Belgium. He also plays modern and baroque bassoon.