Last week, for the first time, representatives from Musical Futures champion schools across the whole of the UK converged on a frankly Kremlin-esque diocese in Leeds for the annual Musical Futures conference.
There was so much to take from the two days, it seems sensible to break it down session by session.
Photographs and videos from both days can be found here.
Session 1 - Keynote: David Price
You always know you are going to get something frank, and honest from David. Much of his address focused on a reflection of 10 years of Musical Futures, which at first was a project, then an initiative, an approach and now could be described fairly as a movement. I believe a third of schools in England now run at least part of their curriculum using the musical futures pedagogies.
Most teachers are well aware of the tiresome merry-go-round of initiative after initiative, where the big thing is AfL for a few years, then focus shifts to differentiation or 21st century skills.
Musical Futures longevity for me is as a result of a few simple factors.
Firstly it was built upon sound classroom research and as such was a ground-up model. I don't know many sectors where research and practice are so disparate as education, this was not the case with Musical Futures. Don't get me wrong, I know there are some fantastic things happening, but I would challenge anyone to argue that there is not a significant voice with an "up there/down here" attitude.
In the sciences for example, research and practice are in essence the same thing. How many schools have proper links with their local universities with teachers acting as researchers and the universities with fellows on the ground as it were.
Secondly at the heart of Musical Futures, is the attention to the traditional disconnect between students experiences of music in and out of school.
Finally, it is impossible to deliver Musical Futures without teaching musically, or as Ofsted would say, music is the target language. The two main pedagogies of Informal Learning and Classroom Workshops are ways of working where teachers play lots and explain little.
At home our students are practically all avid consumers and often creators of music, and yet in many music classrooms they sit behind desks (nothing wrong with this in a non-practical subject) learning from worksheets (you see where I am going here).
David also outlined six imperatives of social learning:
- Do it yourself (autonomy)
- Do it now (immediacy)
- Do it with friends (collegiality)
- Do unto others (generosity)
- Do it for fun (playfulness)
- Do it for the world to see (high visibility)
David is someone with whom I have worked closely over the years, and it was clear to me where his thinking had come from, Much of my own current thinking on education has come from a visit to High Tech High in San Diego, which I have written about often on this blog.
There is always a danger with lists, that they become just that, slogans which are banded about in schools with senior management crying joyously "Riiiiiiiiight" as they tick off there catch phrase check-list proclaiming about just how much the staff know their stuff.
I think the arts are special. There is an inherent freedom within them to do things a little bit differently. The above list sings projects!
David talked about the next steps for Musical Futures and how we can continue to innovate for another 10 years. One area that I intend to focus on is on how Musical Futures can exist in a Project Based Learning framework.
If we are to continue to thrive and grow as a movement (and it really does feel like that, I have never been to a conference with such a sense of shared purpose and community), then we need to think about what next. There were pilots for approaches to singing and music technology which I will discuss in later posts.
The conference was genuinely superb, far and away the best music CPD I have ever had, and there were lots of little nuggets, things you could immediately take away and use with your classes and I intend to share these. But on a more important level I hope to use the next few posts to reflect upon how this fits into the bigger picture of Musical Futures continued evolution, and the challenging vista towards which music education is currently peering anxiously.
0 comments:
Post a Comment