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Abstract

There is a strong history of musician–teacher partnerships and the opportunities they offer for musical creativity and enrichment in a school curriculum, but there is less clarity about how teachers and musicians work together and how they perceive their partnership. This is now an important area for research because the concept of partnership is fundamental to the strategic and operational structure of music education in England.

This research begins by tracing a broad historical development of musician–teacher partnerships within the period of the Education Reform Act (1988) and the National Plan for Music Education (2011). At the end of the twentieth century there were deeply embedded epistemological and pedagogical challenges within music education in the published National Curriculum for music (1992, 1995, 1999, 2013). There appeared little National guidance around how teachers were to embrace teaching music as a creative art and the logistics of group composition work. These and other challenges remain unresolved and were exacerbated by the National Plan for Music Education (2011, 2022) which introduced a further pedagogy of whole class ensemble teaching: a combination of traditional instrumental teaching to blend with a formal school pedagogy.

Despite the critical position of strategic and operational partnerships within music education, they are not defined, and they hold no statutory status. Teachers and musicians interpret their own partnerships but there is still relatively little ‘grass roots’ research into how musicians and teachers interpret their partnerships.

This research aimed to find out how partnerships are interpreted by musicians and primary school teachers and the impact musician–teacher partnerships can have upon primary school teachers. The research is based within an interpretative framework and constructed as two related studies. I interviewed musicians and teachers and followed Braun and Clarke’s (2013, 2021, 2022) techniques of thematic analysis to interpret interviews with musicians and teachers.

In Study 1 I present three themes with reference to a model of personal power, borrowed from the leadership theories of Hersey at al., (1996). The model enabled me to identify a dynamic relationship of personal power between a musician as leader and a teacher as follower both of which are related to the roles they adopted within their partnership at any one time. The model presents a positive perspective of musicians and teachers within projects led by musicians. It suggests a non-hierarchical model closer to a symbiotic relationship between musicians and teachers, which challenges some of the findings of, for example, Williams (2007) and Partington (2017).

In Study 2 I present an example of a model of a musician–teacher partnership based upon a framework connecting the relationship between the musician and teacher, their shared vision and thinking ‘out-of-the-box’. The framework sits within combined pedagogic approaches to teaching and learning and is driven by a music curriculum based on improvisation. Although in its infancy it aligns well with frameworks of collaboration (John-Steiner 2000) and signature pedagogies (Creech et al., 2022). The model is set within.

Such blend of expertise has the potential to contribute to the ways in which we teach music in our schools, addressing a continuing dilemma of what to teach in music and how to teach it. Musician–teacher partnerships retain their attraction within the field of music education and command further research into shared pedagogic frames and musician and teacher discourses.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Departments:	Doctoral Theses

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