Don’t You Dare Close Your Eyes!

In our last post I revealed that we’re living in an Education Multiworld™ and finished with the question: “So, how’s your education world?”. Maybe you’re like me back in the 90s with Jeremy Alsop and you’re thinking: “I have a world?”. Or maybe you already had a world but this Education Multiworld™ concept has blown your mind and you’re desperate to know more? Well, what if I told you that, just like Peabo Bryson in the closing credits of the Disney animated classic Aladin: “I can show you the world” or worlds and maybe even introduce you to “a whole new world”, or two. So “don’t you dare close your eyes”.

Revealing the Five Worlds

Returning to the five worlds of the Education Multiworld™ revealed in Davis and Francis’ fourth edition of Engaging Minds:

* Premodern Education - 3000 BCE (updated title circa 2023 website)

* Standardised Education - 1600s

* Authentic Education - early 1900s

* Democratic Citizenship Education - 1960s

* Systemic Sustainability Education - 1990s (p. i)

I’ll show you how to develop a Worldview X-ray Vision™ “superpower” that will equip you to “see through” the words people use to talk about knowledge, learning, and teaching to “unveil” their education world. This is crucial because it’s likely that conversations between inhabitants of different worlds of the Education Multiworld™ are lost in translation, making it almost impossible to have a shared understanding about what is worth knowing, what good teaching is, and what it means for students to learn, to name just a few big questions. This superpower won’t just allow you to position others though, you can also use this power on your own language and slide into philosophy to find a whole new world or worlds of education for you and your students.

What’s a Metaphor For?

The key to unlocking our Worldview X-ray Vision™ is to understand the role of metaphors. While humans are capable of logical reasoning, we generally default to analogical reasoning through the use of metaphors. Indeed the word metaphor is a metaphor, coming from the Greek meta + pherein meaning “to carry across”. For example “learning is grasping” carries across the “simple act of a grabbing an object to the complex event of transforming understanding” (Davis & Francis, 2018, p. 11).

So, each era of education has a dominant paradigm with “clouds” of associated icons, metaphors and language that guide the action of a community of specialists. Davis and Francis maintain that:

metaphors pervade though and influence action, similarly, each synonym for teaching is both a description and a prescription. That is, each point to both a theory (i.e., literally, a ‘way of seeing’) and a practice. And, “every metaphor of knowledge triggers its own cascade of consequences and associations”. (Davis and Francis, 2022, p. 48)

As an example, look at this “cascade of entailments”:

* Knowledge is an object →

* Learning is acquiring →

* Learners are repositories (p. 48) →

This cascade leads to the prescription that:

* Teaching is depositing objects into imperfect receptacles (Davis, 2018, p. 183)

While these clouds of metaphors are often implicit or invisible, they frame the discourse of each education world. So, the next step in unlocking our Worldview X-ray Vision™ is to “see” each world’s metaphors and make the implicit explicit by learning to identify the discourse or the shared language associated with each world. Based on Engaging Minds and its associated website, learningdiscourses.com I’ve compiled a hitlist for each world. Let’s begin by meeting educators from each world:

1. Premodern World - 3000 BCE

Premodern Educators (PEs) inhabit a world carved out of traditions inherited from the ancient Greek Academy, the medieval university, and the early parochial (or parish) schools. They are devoted to order and believe truth is eternal, universal, and independent of human existence. Their metaphor is clear direction and the “straight and narrow,” avoiding deviations and deflections (i.e., anything off the line) (Davis & Francis, 2023). Their approach to teaching is mainly about helping individuals to understand their place in the universe. (2022, p. 5).

2. Standardised World - 1600s

Standardised Educators (SEs) inhabit a world that emphasises common programs of study, age-based grade levels, and uniform performance outcomes. They draw much of their inspiration and content from ancient traditions and religion, but their main influences are industry and the physical sciences. Their approach to teaching focuses on facts and skills, and is modeled after working on a factory line. (2022, p. 5).

3. Authentic World

Authentic Educators (AEs) inhabit a world rooted in the human sciences and emphasise personal engagement, learner difference, developmental stages, and personalised learning aligned with individual curiosities and goals. Their classroom approaches are based in reality, focused on understanding, and rich with inquiry. Their teaching is less directive and more attentive to individuals (2022, p.5).

4. Democratic Citizenship World

Democratic Citizenship Educators (DCEs) live in a world Informed mainly by the social sciences. They emphasise emancipation, empowerment, and voice, in schools which are democratically governed by students who also have autonomy in managing their own learning. DCEs aim to promote social justice and productive collective action through recognising and (where appropriate) subverting hegemonic structures. They see teaching as preparing students to contribute to a better society by addressing cultural inequities and suppressions through raising awarenesses (2022, p. i).

5. Systemic Sustainability World

Systemic Sustainability Educators (SSEs) inhabit a global, complex ecosystem and believe that formal schooling has been too narrowly focused on humanity – with an either-or approach to individuals and society. They are concerned with educating global citizens with knowledge of political and ecological issues who have the skills, attitudes, and dispositions to participate mindfully in efforts to affect the world in ways that are ecologically sustainable. SSEs look beyond traditional and assumed borders or boundaries and hope to enable and promote interactions between diverse peoples and ideas. They see teaching as raising awareness of and developing effective responses to social, cultural, and ecological issues arising from environmental challenges associated with human activity that move us toward an “ecologically-minded and information-based society” (2022, p.5).

So What Is Knowledge, Learning and Teaching?

So, what does uncovering these worlds and worldviews mean for the humble classroom music teacher’s understanding of knowledge, learning, and teaching. It means that these matters are not settled (2022, p. 40), they are essentially contested concepts. Davis and Francis remind us that:

Our conception of teaching is that of the dominant culture. A sign of the privilege of the dominant culture is a freedom from having to be explicit about assumptions - or, for that matter, even to be aware of them. That's because the traditions and beliefs of the dominant culture are allowed to serve as the normal, commonsensical backdrop. (2022, p. 40)

They argue that although Standardised Education has had decades of “extensive criticisms”, it “continues to prevail”, held in place by the

* familiarity of practice,

* uncritical beliefs about learning,

* oppressive regimes of examination,

* its momentum (p. 40).

They remind us that:

It is difficult to conceive of education in terms that depart far from the implicit ideals of objective knowledge, standardised outputs and efficient productivity. No other frame of formal education is so well fitted to the scientised and commercialised culture in which schools must operate. (p. 40)

Clearly, it’s time to slide into philosophy.

Worldview X-ray Vision™ - Your Discourse Analysis Super Power

To help us to reveal assumptions and potentially communicate across the Education Multiworld, I’ve created the Education Multiworld Metaphor Matrix. The matrix is adapted from various tables developed by Brent Davis over the last 20 years and draws heavily on a table in the 4th edition of Engaging Minds and information at learningdiscourses.com.

Next time you slide into philosophy, use the matrix to help you to unveil your cascade of entailments and/or interrogate the language used in the educational discourse in your community. The matrix can also be employed with the Septem Circumstantiae whenever colleagues, bosses, politicians etc start spruiking “best” teaching practices or argue for more empirical research, to unveil their assumptions about “best where, when, and for whom” (2002, p. 10) etc. Davis and Francis argue that “even evidently scientific discourses on learning are riddled with unexplicated, often naïve, and occasionally problematic metaphors” (p. 13).

As we develop our Worldview X-ray Vision, it can help us to understand each other and begin to see how a logical entailment in one world could be completely nonsensical in another. Crucially, for classroom music teachers providing Gig Based Learning opportunities, the world our classroom inhabits might either nurture or reject our approach. Being able to speak across world’s might help us to create more helpful cascades of entailments for ourselves and also, perhaps allow us to translate our work for bosses and other power brokers. Remember, these metaphors are descriptions AND prescriptions. Unlocking a new world doesn’t just open our minds to new possibilities to talk about knowledge, learning, and teaching, it opens up new possibilities for action - new ways to learn, new ways to teach, and potentially gives new, broader, and perhaps even more inspiring purpose\s for our work in the music classroom. This is a big deal!

I’ve just scratched the surface of Brent Davis’ work in this post. If it’s ignited a spark for you, you’ll love Inventions of Teaching, and Engaging Minds, and you might even be brave enough to eventually tackle learningdiscourses.com - just make sure you watch the orientation video first - that map is a doozy! Let me know if you do and I’ll join you on the magic carpet ride…

I’ll sign off with a personalised provocation from Davis and Francis:

The evolution of [your] new horizons of educational possibility might be better served by efforts to understand the current discursive landscape than by claiming and defending patches of [your] terrain. (2022, p. 13)

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* I love these guys. Eye of the tiger | funk cover by Scary Pockets. Link

* This is a really interesting gig idea for students. Limit them to a certain amount/style of gear. Thanks Andrew Huang & Rob Scallon. Link

* ISME just posted a video on AI that has gone viral (for music education = 30 views worldwide!). Link

* Seriously so cool. I’d be screaming too. BO DIDDLEY 1965. Link

* All Blues!! How Pink Floyd used this Miles Davis chord. Link

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

“Nevertheless, instead of engaging in the thoughtful diagnosis of local conditions and ofthe philosophy needed to "write curriculum," many music teachers instead adopt this or that technicist method as the curriculum and proceed to teach it-the "method"-in the name of "curriculum"!

The problem is not that the tools (the teaching strategies, activities, lessons, materials, and so on) are necessarily faulty. Rather, the problem is the technicist assumption that the tools are "the curriculum" by themselves, regardless of what they may or may not regularly produce!

In fact, many of the tools of such methods can often be detached from slavish technicism.

In music teaching a wealth of tools exists that can be mindfully used when guided by valid curricular outcomes and professional accountability for right results.” (Thomas A. Regelski, 2002)

P.S:

One of the most common questions I get:

How do I know what gear to buy for my music classroom?

Well, I use the gear on the GBL '“Gear We Dig” page. It’s all there!

BTW our community of practitioners have been chatting classroom music room setups.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Circa 1991/92: I’m 21 and studying at Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts in the Bachelor of Music (Improvisation) degree which includes electric bass guitar lessons with Jeremy Alsop. Jeremy has just returned from living in New York, playing with The Cats, and has adopted a “New York state of mind”. In a moment that has stayed with me ever since, he enters the room and opens with “How’s your world?”. “Wait a minute!” I thought, “I have a world?!”.

Hello, I’m Dr Brad Fuller and this is the Gig Based Learning podcast.

Fast forward about 25 years and I’m “sliding into philosophy”, reading Ian Hacking’s introduction in the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” when he casually drops:

And of course there are many worlds: I live in a world different from that of opera divas or the great rappers. Clearly there is a lot of room for confusion if one starts talking about different worlds. All sorts of things may be meant. (p 21)

Holy Smokes, Jeremy has a world, I have a world, Ian Hacking has a world, opera divas have a world, and great rappers have a world. That does seem to leave a lot of room for confusion. All of these worlds and confusion seem to stem from those stealthy assumptions, beliefs, and ideas we’ve been talking about. Fortunately, Canadian academic Brent Davis and his various co-authors have been working away for most of the century trying to clear up this confusion about worlds in education. Phew.

Clouds of Ideas

Davis uses Kelly (2010) as a launchpad for his inquiries. Kelly maintains that:

Ideas never stand alone. They come woven in a web of auxiliary ideas, consequential notions, supporting concepts, foundational assumptions, side effects, and logical consequences and a cascade of subsequent possibilities. Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them. (Kelly, 2010, pp. 44-45 in Davis, 2018)

These clouds of ideas and assumptions come together to form an “invisible backdrop” for how an individual “sees” the world or their “worldview” (Davis & Francis, 2022, p. 9).

Worldviews, Paradigms, and Frames

Methodologist John W. Creswell “favours” the term “worldview” but says it’s often used “synonymously” with “paradigm”, a term Kuhn resurrected from, you guessed it, the Greeks, when he reintroduced it to the world in the aforementioned “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Aristotle used paradigm like we use “exemplar, i.e., a very best and most instructive example” (Kuhn, 2012, p. 15). Unfortunately, the use of “paradigm” is a bit like “pedagogy” and by 1970 Kuhn wrote that he’d “lost control of it” (See Figure 1).

I’ve developed a definition that combines versions from research gurus Guba and Creswell to get:

A paradigm is a basic set of generalizations, beliefs, and values that guide the action of a community of specialists. (Adapted from Creswell, 2018, p. 88; Guba, 1990, p. 17)

But I think Davis and Francis’ version might be the most useful for us. They say that:

Paradigm refers to both a system of thinking and an image [or metaphor] that can serve as a symbol for that system.

They say that a “worldview is a frame”, an “extensive and complex web of meaning” which we “look through’ to see the world (p. 4). They use “frame” to “refer to coherent and resilient systems of thinking” (p. 9).

Kuhn believed that paradigm changes in science, like the Copernican Turn in astronomy that swapped the sun for the earth at the centre, “tend to operate sequentially as more powerful images and their associated sensibilities displace entrenched ones” causing scientists to “see the world of their research-engagement differently”. He says:

In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.

Kuhn called this movement from one frame to another a Paradigm Shift but Davis observes that “within education, it appears that multiple paradigms can exist simultaneously, all operating in tension with one another” (2018, p. 185).

Framing the Education Multiworld™

Whereas scientists seem to eventually move to a new world - OK maybe the sun really is at the centre of the universe - paradigm change in education seems to result in a tension soaked Marvel-like Education Multiworld™. As new clouds of ideas and assumptions emerge and begin to guide the action of a community of specialists, the old world carries on. In the recently released 4th edition of Engaging Minds, Davis and co-author Krista Francis identify five worlds -

* Early Formal Education - 3000 BCE

* Standardised Education - 1600s

* Authentic Education - early 1900s

* Democratic Citizenship Education - 1960s

* Systemic Sustainability Education - 1990s (p. i)

How’s Your (Education) World?

So, how’s your education world? This question is crucial because each of these worlds in the Education Multiworld operate in “different webs of metaphors” and it’s likely that inhabitants of different worlds can’t understand each other. Davis and Francis note that:

Webs of association are meaning and compelling from the inside, but they can be confusing and nonsensical from the outside. (p. 12)

And remember, as Guba explains, these clouds of ideas and assumptions guide our actions and as Kelly pointed out, these actions have side effects, logical consequences, and a cascade of subsequent possibilities. Surely then we should strive to live in the world which is most nurturing for us and our students - nobody should live in a world where their ideas are confusing and nonsensical.

To that end, in the next instalment we’ll pack our clouds of ideas into a metaphorical removalist van and maybe head west in search of new classroom music education frontiers. We’ll look at how the words people use to define and explain knowledge, learning, and teaching can reveal their world of residence and slide into some more philosophy about how we can ask better questions to find a better world of education.

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* If bell hooks Made a Learning Management System (Holy Heck that’s a challenging chapter!)

* More at his website: https://www.jessestommel.com/

* Dave Koz is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.

* One benefit of YouTube Premium is that you can create ‘clips’ so here is Tal’s Sick Bass Lick into Larry’s Solo

* And Herbie Tells Jacob Collier that “Music Is Life” (more on this in a future post).

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. The conviction persists, though history shows it to be a hallucination, that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But, in fact, intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume, an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitalism and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them, we get over them. (John Dewey, 1910, Section IV, par. 26)

P.s. I publish free teacher professional learning courses…

Engage with them and join in discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Last time, we promised DnM that we’d “get our heads together” and start asking the right questions. In honour of Regelski, I’m going to call this “sliding into philosophy”. Regelski reminded us that when we slide into philosophy we have some rules to go by: like, you need to know what’s already been said on a topic. But what are the topics and what are the questions?

The Septem Circumstantiae

Enter Aristotle sometime around 350 BC with the “Septem Circumstantiae” aka the “Seven Circumstances” or what journalists call the “Five W’s (and one H)" (Sloan, 2010, Robertson Jr, 1946). In Book 3 of Nicomachean Ethics (“Say That Word Second™”) Aristotle wrestles with the concept of just vs unjust actions and determines that “it is necessary for students of virtue to differentiate between … voluntary and involuntary [acts]” (Eth. Nic. 1109b32–35), essentially another angle on the “beware of stealthy assumptions” warning.

According to Sloan (2010), Aristotle believed that “any statement must be made plausible or convincing by adding detailed information” and he provided the template of the seven types of circumstance as a strategy to work through “in order to supply substantial information to corroborate one’s statement” (p. 248) and avoid “regretted actions” (p. 245).

Boethius and the Seven Questions

About 850 years after Aristotle, Roman philosopher Boethius fashioned the circumstances into seven questions that work really well when translated into English as:

Who,

What,

Why,

How,

Where,

When,

With what?

Aristotle cautions us on the dangers of ignoring the circumstances of our actions saying:

Thus with ignorance as a possibility concerning […], the circumstances of the act, the one who acts in ignorance of any of them seems to act involuntarily, and especially regarding the most important ones. And it seems that the most important circumstances are those just listed, including the “why.” Indeed inasmuch as an action has been called involuntary in accordance with such ignorance, still it is necessary that the deed evokes sorrow and regret. (Eth. Nic. 1111a15–20 quoted in Sloan, 2010, p. 240).

Thankfully, Boethius, has given us a list of seven questions that we can use to help us to act justly and voluntarily and to hopefully minimise our “sorrow and regret”. But, in a footnote at the bottom of that last quote, Sloan offers an alternative translation that might just be a game changer for us:

“And it seems that the most important circumstances are the ‘who’ and the ‘why.’” (2010, p. 240).

Sliding into Philosophy with Seven Questions

Now, we are starting to build in some more rules for “sliding into philosophy”. We can use the Septem Circumstantiae to help us to construct our own philosophies of education which will illustrate our actions (you’ll recall that I call my version: Bradagogy). We can begin by using them to interrogate the essentially contested concepts at the core of our profession. Rather than making assumptions about education we can ask questions like:

* Who is classroom music education for?

* Why should those students have access to classroom music education?

* What should they learn about music?

* How should they learn it?

* With what should they learn? - for example this might open up questions about technology rich vs technology restricted

* Where should they have their music classes?

* When should they have their music classes?

And, of course, these questions rest on assumptions about who is education for generally and why should children be educated in schools etc, so you might like to start there before tackling the classroom music education questions. But remember, we don’t have to start from scratch - The Cats of Music Education have already thought about this so we can draw on their answers to help us to formulate our own.

Seven Questions for Reflective Practice

But wait, there’s more, we can also use the Septum Circumstantiae as the basis for our own reflective practice. This is a micro version of the big questions where we can look at the students in front of us and ask:

* Who are these people, or even better, who are these persons, and even better, who is this person? Who am I doing classroom music education with and for?

* Why am I doing classroom music education with and for them?

By getting the best possible answers to those two key questions, and only then, we can then start to think about the next set. Based on who is in our classrooms (including us), and why we are there:

* What should we learn? Should everybody learn the same thing/s?

* How should we learn it? Should everyone learn the same way?

* What tools/technologies might we employ? Might these be different on a per student basis?

* Where should we learn? This also works closely with “the how” and opens up questions about classroom design.

* When should we learn? This opens up questions about co-curricular, blended learning etc.

As I’ve alluded here, these questions seem to have an interrelated feeling about them. The kinds of answers to one question has flow-on effects to other answers, “ingredients” change, you get better at asking questions, you get better at finding answers, and you test all of this out in real life as your theories illustrate your practice. To that end, I use “The Septum Circumstantiae of Classroom Music Education” as a schema or model to remind me to continue to rotate through these questions in my own practice. It’s a recursive model which simply means that it’s a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage, essentially a rinse and repeat.

Good Questions, Good Teaching, and Good Lives

So there you have it, an Aristotelian basis (that’s what philosophers call anything to do with Aristotle) for your reflective practice that also provides a tool for you to dig into the big questions at the core of our profession. As Aristotle reminds us, the “who” and “why” are the “most important”. I think there’s pretty solid evidence on the macro level that classroom music education has a history of making assumptions about the “who” and the “why” and jumping to the “what” and “how”. On the micro level, these assumptions have resulted in involuntary actions being carried out in music classrooms leading to much “sorrow and regret” for teachers and students. Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics as part of his greater project to understand what human beings need in order to live life at its best (Kraut, 2022). If classroom music education is leading to sorrow and regret rather than life at its best “perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions”?

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* Shutter Encoder: Make webm video’s for your LMS/website for free.

* Pete and I (and Dr James Humberstone FRSA) have been alluding to the Mighty Boosh a lot over this week. This Jazz Trance scene is iconic.

* Sting - Bring On The Night (1985): The behind the scenes documentary.

* Andrew Huang is up to some good things with creative challenges. They weren’t allowed to talk in the creation of this piece.

* Hiromi: Tiny Desk Concert. She’s so great.

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

How could anything as widespread and culturally pervasive as music education require serious thinking, let alone “a philosophy”? The answer is simple. As the Roman poet Phaedrus said, “Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden” (Elliott and Silverman, 2015, p. 6)

p.s. Want to get to know me (and other GBLers) further?

Engage with free courses, and join in discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You know that famous Oscar Wilde dad joke about assumptions? "When you assume something, you might make an ass of yourself, and/ or me? And, have you ever noticed how many asses there are wandering about in the field of classroom music education? Maybe there’s a connection?

Our Inextricably Linked Thoughts and Actions

Check out this passage from DnM, page 10:

Our thoughts and actions are intimately and inextricably linked; our assumptions, beliefs, mindsets, and interpre­tations inform and drive our actions, and our actions feed back to and have an impact on our assumptions and beliefs. Whether teachers realize it or not, every teaching­-learning decision and action we carry out before, during, and after we interact with "students" (taken in the broadest sense) is guided (consciously and non-consciously) by what we assume, believe, or think about why, what, how, where, and when we do what we do, and the people we are doing it with and for. (2015, p. 10)

This passage didn’t just change my teaching, it changed my life. Let’s dig into it and see where it takes us.

Realise it or Not?

Whether we realise it or not, every teaching-learning decision and action we carry out is guided by our assumptions and beliefs.

But wait, it gets worse.

DnM warn that:

Staying alert for assumptions is vital because they are "stealthy.” They sink into our minds subcon­sciously during conversations, while we're scanning blogs and Facebook, and when we read poorly researched books and articles. (2015, p.29)

It’s OK, I’ve researched the heck out of this article, just don’t scan it…

But, seriously, let’s nail this down. So, we all have beliefs and assumptions about teaching and learning, it’s likely we‘re not aware of at least some of them due to their “stealthy” nature, and we have to be continuously on guard against new assumptions sneaking their way in. And, we can’t just outsource our beliefs to the experts because, as you’ll recall from my post “Rabbit Season, Duck Season”, our whole operation rests on “essentially contested concepts”, the experts don’t necessarily agree, so it’s up to us to uncover our beliefs and assumptions about education. But before you decide to pick a side, let’s hear from the “Heaviest Cat” in music education, Thomas A. Regelski. He says:

It ultimately goes back to the question: What of all that could be taught is most worth teaching? And some of the answer is: What of all that should be taught can I teach well and effectively? When I pose that question I immediately slide into: well to answer it, you’re doing philosophy. I don’t care whether you like it or not, but you’re doing philosophy. When you’re doing philosophy then you’ve got some rules to go by. You can’t just say whatever you think you want or you believe. You’ve got some rules to go by: like, you need to know what’s already been said on a topic. (YouTube, 2020, 49:21)

Like it or Not, We’re Doing Philosophy

Whether we realise it or not, we have assumptions about teaching and whether we like it or not, we’re doing philosophy. Notice, it’s doing philosophy? This gets back to the need to stay alert, to continue to uncover and question our beliefs and assumptions because as DnM pointed out “our actions feed back to and have an impact on our assumptions and beliefs”. This suggests a continuous, ongoing, circular or recursive process. Embracing philosophy as a doing is so important because, as Regelski says, it gives us “some rules to go by”.

Gig Based Learning - Musically Informed, Philosophically Driven

We’ve already started philosophising by taking up Regelski’s advice to “know what’s already been said on a topic”. That’s why we started with our “Cats of Music Education Series”, so we could learn what “The Cats” have said on the topic of classroom music education. Plus, we’ve established that our field rests on “essentially contested concepts” and we’re inclined to think in terms of either-ors - so we know to be on the lookout. Plus, we’ve taken on Hargreave’s et al’s advice to “focus on processes of teacher inquiry”, and build a professional community of practice where teachers experience the time, [and] encouragement, [and work] together. Finally, by sharing my music education philosophy which informs my personal pedagogy, or “Bradagogy”, which is manifested through Gig Based Learning, I’m answering Paulo Freire’s call. He says:

We must have a clear and lucid grasp of our action (which implies a theory) whether we wish to or not ... There is no dichotomy between theory and practice ... practice acquires a new significance when it is illustrated by a theory. (1973, p. 112)

Let’s Get Philosophical!

Alright - Freire has set us up. Philosophising is not an either-or, which gets us to ”Gig Based Learning is action ‘illustrated’ by theory.” Thanks PF!

So, I think we’ve taken some ground in this post. Let’s look to DnM for our next steps. They say:

Thus, if we want to teach or act as well­ prepared, effective, educative (more on this term later), ethical, and "professional" [classroom music teachers], then we must get our heads together about the who, why, what, how, where, whether, and when of music teaching and learning, as well as how to implement these concepts in action.

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do here DnM. So, our next step is to start asking the right questions. Let’s get our heads together… Oh, and let’s try not to make an ass of ourselves…

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* The Psychological impact of Poverty with Dr. Katriona O Sullivan: a beautiful interview that I found equally challenging and inspirational.

* Poor: Her book on Audible. I’m listening to it now if you’d like to join me.

* How daily music classes transformed school into ‘happiest place on Earth’: A nice break from the pro explicit instruction articles that have been running rampant lately.

* A Golden Age for A******s: Loved this.

* Honest Government Ad | Canada 🇨🇦: It’s great and really sad at the same time…

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

The rationale statements at the start of virtually any current curriculum document can be used to underscore [that there is an enormous diversity of belief represented in contemporary discussions of learning and teaching]. It’s not unusual to find references to nurturing individuals toward their full potentials, guiding them to their proper places in society, instructing them in sound habits of mind, measuring educational achievement, modeling appropriate behaviors, and empowering learners—despite the incoherences that emerge when such statements are clustered together. (Davis, 2004, p. 168)

Ways to work together?

* Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.

* Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.

* Want to get to know me further? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Pedagogy Everywhere

Gee I hear the word “pedagogy” a lot. I hear it pronounced in a myriad of ways too. Woah - I just googled it. It’s not just me:

According to Google, there are at least ten pronunciations of pedagogy loose in the wild as we speak. This explains why it’s high on my list I call “Say This Word Second™” just below, diaspora and hegemony. As you might have gleaned, I use pedagogy, but I quite enjoy when Americans use “ped-a-goe-jee” and “peed-a-goe-gee” must surely be the most hardcore.

Back to Google: it seems the pronunciation problem didn’t exist until the bump in usage around the turn of the 20th century which coincides with the rise in compulsory school-based education, in what Hargreaves et al would call the “Anglophone Nations”. Then it seems to fall out of fashion, maybe mirroring the demise of progressive education in the post-war period, then takes off like a unicorn startup in the 80s, just as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) emerges - hmmm… interesting…

Everyone’s a Pedagogue!

So, all of a sudden, everyone’s a pedagogue, but until recently, I’ve felt like the guy in the Canadian Club ad, I don’t really know what “pedagogy” means and I have this sneaking suspicion that I’m not alone. In this post I’ll share my journey to understand pedagogy and what happens next.

Given that there’s no consensus on the pronunciation, what are the chances of broad agreement on what pedagogy actually is? And, how might our own (conscious or unconscious) definition determine or maybe limit our actions as pedagogues? Well, in their chapter from 1999 called “Pedagogy: What do we know? Watkins and Mortimer start with the heading “pedagogy”, [ready for it?] “a contested term” (p. 1). Looks like we might need to do some philosophising…

But What is Pedagogy?

Let’s start with a “disambiguation”. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “ambiguity has excited philosophers for a very, very long time”, at least since Aristotle. It excites me too and it’s a vitally important tool for Gig Based Learners as critical thinkers. Disambiguation is the process of interrogating words to try to remove the ambiguity in their meaning, or to distinguish between different meanings of words to “clear up confusion”. As a starting point, philosophers often use etymology to uncover the origin of a word and how its meaning has “changed over the course of history”.

Back to Watkins and Mortimer, they say that:

“Pedagogy”, [is] derived from French and Latin adaptations of the Greek [παισ, παιδ (boy) + αγωγοσ (leader)], literally means a man having oversight of a child, or an attendant leading a boy to school. This meaning is now obsolete. (1999, p. 1)

So, adapting for modern usage - Pedagogy - to lead a child. Is that meaning obsolete? How many current classroom teachers see teaching as “leading children”? Is it possible this notion persists and possibly limits possibilities in our classroom?

Next, Pedagogy as “the science of teaching” vs Pedagogy as “the art of teaching” sets up a classic Deweyan either-or and it’s problematic since “such definition depends on the reader’s conceptions of ‘teaching’” (p. 2) - wait a second, there are conceptions of teaching? Yes there are, more on that in a future post. This “Science and Art” notion has been around since that first hump in our google graph and persists along with a tweak in the 1990s that suggested that pedagogy might be actually be a “craft”.

But, so far, it’s all about the “teacher”. Haven’t we forgotten someone? Watkins and Mortimer remind us that these definitions of pedagogy are really just “didactics” or the transfer of information from teacher to student. But what about the student? Which brings us to recent developments and the OECD.

The OECD and Pedagogy

A 2018 paper produced by the OECD suggests that “a good starting point in conceptualising pedagogy is Loughran’s definition” (p. 36) from 2013 which takes pedagogies as “ways of looking at the interactions of teaching and learning in the real time of classroom practice”. Therefore:

Pedagogy is thus both knowledge (ways of looking at) and action (the decision-making and designs shaping the interactions of teaching and learning in classroom practice). [D]ecisions about instruction are informed by knowledge about the relations of teaching and learning [and] these repertoires for designing learning environments and practice build on previous instruction and [in] a dynamic model connecting knowledge and action. (p. 36)

Yes!

Pedagogy as Craft combining Teaching and Learning as Science and as Art

Bringing this all together, Pollard (2010) suggested pedagogy is simultaneously a form of science, craft, and art where “science is the knowledge and art is in the practice” (Paniagua, 2018, p. 37). Now we’re getting somewhere. Bring it together for us Paniagua:

Pedagogy as science refers to how forms of instruction are made explicit, coherent and generalisable through the learning sciences. Pedagogy as art refers to how teachers implement pedagogical approaches, strategies and tools intuitively and creatively, through contextualised personal responses and capacities. The interaction between these two ends comes together in the notion of ‘craft’, as a mastery of a repertoire of skills and practices - knowledge about practice and putting knowledge into practice. Pedagogy as craft stands in the interface between the learning sciences and idiosyncratic, contextualised teacher classroom practices; it encapsulates scientific knowledge in application and intuitive practice, informing professional judgements about approaches to teaching.

Source: Adapted by Paniagua, (2018) from Pollard, A. (ed.) (2010), Professionalism as Pedagogy: A Contemporary Opportunity: A Commentary by TLRP and GTCE, TLRP, London.

And this next part is a bombshell:

Craft, then, lies in the dynamic intersection of science and art (dark blue zone), but is wider with boundaries as indicated by the dashed line. Craft includes scientific knowledge that is not yet fully validated as implementation into practice or is still permeating teaching practices; it also incorporates practices that are well-established but with only limited scientific evidence about their impact.

See why this is such a bombshell? Pedagogy as the “dynamic intersection of science and art” gives us agency to “implement pedagogical approaches, strategies and tools intuitively and creatively, through contextualised personal responses and capacities”. It’s still all about the teacher but that’s OK for now because we have agency to include the student in decisions about their learning - that’s a pedagogical practice. So, there’s my call to action: to improve the quality of my “professional judgements about approaches to teaching” by increasing my “knowledge and understanding of learning sciences” and integrate them into my “idiosyncratic, contextualised teacher classroom practices”.

Introducing Bradagogy

Neologisms have also excited philosophers for a very, very long time. A philosopher creates a neologism “as a shorthand for a complex construct or to distinguish a single denotation--and shed the connotations--of an existing word. Neologisms also serve to facilitate the spread a philosopher's work. So, I think a neologism is warranted here. I’ve established that pedagogy is a complex construct, it’s also become heavily laden with unhelpful connotations that need to be shed, and I could use some help to spread my work. So, I hereby coin:

Bradagogy - the dynamic intersection of Brad (musician-teacher-learner) and Pedagogy (the craft of teaching and learning)

Source: Adapted from Paniagua, (2018) which was adapted from Pollard, A. (ed.) (2010), Paniagua, A., & Istance, D. (2018). Teachers as designers of learning environments: The importance of innovative pedagogies. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264085374-en

Bradagogy is my unique Dialogic Critically Reflective Practice (DRCP) of classroom music education which is activated through Gig Based Learning in dialogue with Gig Based Learning co-creator Peter Orenstein and the Gig Based Learning Community of Practice. It’s a personal pedagogy where I combine the art and science of teaching. Bradagogy is the umbrella for everything I’ve written and spoken about thus far. In future, I hope to share how I’ve developed, and am developing my “Bradagogy” and hope it might inspire you to reflect on your practice and maybe coin, describe, and develop your own “-agogy”.

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already: Balanced view on capabilities and limits of large language models.

* Tella - a screen recording app that Teachers and students can use Tella for free.

* How To Screen Record On Mac: A great summary.

* How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education: Pretty compelling from Sal Khan.

* Unit 1: What is AI and how does it work?: Pretty compelling again Sal 👏👏👏

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

Ideas never stand alone. They come woven in a web of auxiliary ideas, consequential notions, supporting concepts, foundational assumptions, side effects, and logical consequences and a cascade of subsequent possibilities. Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them”. (Kelly, 2010, pp. 44-45)

Ways to work together?

* Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.

* Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.

* Want to get to know me further? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Fun fact: I don't jog for exercise, it's so I can listen to podcasts. I love them. I’m also one of those people who grew up making pretend radio shows with a microphone into the family cassette recorder. I even had a radio show on community radio station Radio Northern Beaches with my friend Colin Klupiec back in the day.

So, when I saw the “podcast” button on Substack, I couldn’t help myself. My Mum listened to episode 1 and said:

“something you always said you would like to do when you heard journos when you were young”.

Yes, Mum! This is so cool!

I hope you’ll try the podcast on your commute, run, gym session, etc. It’s also a great companion (IMHO) to enhance the experience as you read the newsletter. You can listen here on Substack or, if you prefer, Apple Podcasts & Spotify.

When Pete and I launched our Gig Based Learning website a while back, we decided to include a blog so we could keep everyone up to date with our adventures. Of all the topics I could have chosen to write about, I chose to begin by featuring the work of my favourite and most influential music education thinkers. I call them “The Cats of Music Education”. Interestingly, I never wrote about why I made the choice to start there, but now they’re available here on Substack, it seems like a great time to bring you behind the scenes.

Backstory

Pete and I love to share blues and jazz culture with our students and we pepper our conversations in class with language from the “Jive” lexicon used and popularised by blues and jazz musicians in a golden age of Jive from the 1920s and peaking with Cab Calloway’s Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: a Hepster’s Dictionary. This language (and vibe) spread through the Beatniks to the Hippies and its influence remains through Rock ‘n’ Roll and Hip hop. Opening up this world is another way we aim to “welcome” our students into the “tradition” of being a musician. Indeed, the very name of this operation is - GIG Based Learning - Gig from the “argot of jazz musicians”. This reflects our intention to develop an approach to classroom music education that evolves out of, not just from how musicians learn, but also what we do, and who we are - how musicians are in the world.

The Cats

A “cat” according to the Hepster’s Dictionary circa 1939 was a “musician in a swing band”. Over the years, it’s become “a sign of respect” to call a musician a cat. I remember my hero Jaco Pastorius using it this way once when he was complimented on his work as a musical innovator. He responded with “I’m just jamming with the Cats”. So, in that spirit, Pete and I introduced a musicological element into our Year 7 program called “The Cats of Music” to help students to discover the cats (style/genre agnostic). Again, this is about remembering that we’re part of a very long line, a tradition, of musicians wh o have so much to offer - we just have to listen. We love it when a 12 year old makes a connection to a past master and says something like “That [performer/composer/etc] was a heavy cat”.

The Cats of Music Education

Thus, The Cats of Music were the inspiration for our first blog series which we’ve recently brought across to Substack - “The Cats of Music Education”.

The series is also informed by my experience as a classroom music teacher. I did so much work in isolation before I had my intellectual awakening around 2010. I thought I had to solve all of my problems and fight my battles alone. But, when I started to discover the music education literature from around 2010, it blew my mind! Why didn’t anybody tell me about these people?! They’ve already thought about all of the things I’m thinking about. Woah!

Marilyn Cochran-Smith explains that I was experiencing “historical amnesia” (2003, p. 278) and that:

Like many areas in education, teacher education is often plagued by the lack of historical perspectives on present issues. Currently, teacher education is troubled by historical amnesia about conceptualizing teaching as a technical activity and, accordingly, conceptualizing teacher preparation as a training problem. (p. 278)

By highlighting the Cats of Music Education, I’m answering a call from education philosopher Nel Noddings (2018). She asserts that each generation must examine the responses of previous generations to the key philosophical questions at the core of school-based education in order to choose what to retain and what to reimagine as they respond to changing conditions in their world. Through Noddings and Stephen Ball (1995), I have identified the need for a personal reconnection to the history of music education—its historical philosophies, pedagogy/pedagogies, methods, and learning theories. I believe that an understanding of how the profession came to be disconnected from its roots provides a means to reconnect and begin to answer Noddings’ questions for myself. If it is helpful for me, perhaps it will also be useful for others?

As a musician, I’m just jamming with the cats - I listen, watch, learn, and join “The Cats of Music”. As a music educator, I’m just jamming with the cats - I listen, watch, learn, and join “The Cats of Music Education”. I hope you’ll find my introduction to the Cats useful and I encourage you to follow the links in the posts to videos of the Cats explaining their work first hand. Check out the cats, “remember” music education, and join the jam!

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* Cab Calloway’s Hepster Dictionary appears in “Riffs & Choruses: A New Jazz Anthology”. It’s a great read, full of historical writings on jazz. It’s on the GBL Bookshelf.

* Reading the Draft 2 of the NSW Music 7-10 Music Syllabus.

* Good friend of the newsletter, Dr James Humberstone, put me onto Sibelius’ new AI features. I feel a dedicated blog post coming on about Music, AI, and what it means for Music Education.

* This made me lol: Spreading Butter on Toast Sound | 1 HOUR

* Speaking of The Cats: Origins of the Moonwalk

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

“The fundamental tensions that drive teacher education emerge and reemerge periodically. Each time they do, they are threaded into and wound around the cur- rent intersections of educational and other kinds of research, practice, and policy. Thus, the tensions are both old and new. They are new in that they are woven into the tapestry of changed and changing political, social, and economic times and thus have a different set of implications each time they reemerge in prominence. But they are also old in that they represent enduring and deep disagreements in society about the purposes of schooling, the value of teaching, and the preparation of teachers”. (Cochran-Smith, 2003, p. 278)

Ways to work together?

* Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.

* Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.

* Want to get to know me further? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

After ten years of studying educational change, Hargreaves et al published Learning to Change: Teaching Beyond Subjects and Standards in 2001 noting that:

A new orthodoxy of schooling appears to be emerging in many parts of the world, especially in the predominantly Anglophone nations. (p. xi)

They define the new orthodoxy as learning which is based on:

… prescribed standards (especially in literacy, numeracy, and science) that almost all students are expected to achieve. These standards are linked to centralized textbooks and redesigned assessments and are enforced through systems of accountability and monitoring that reward successful schools and provide support or threaten closure to those that persistently fall short. (p. xi- xii)

Does that sound familiar? But wait, they’re just warming up…

They say this new approach emerged at a time of “growing concern worldwide about the apparent disengagement of many young adolescents from their schooling and the risks they increasingly encounter in their lives” (p. xii). Well, it’s over 20 years on and that paragraph feels just as concerning in 2023 as it must have been to readers in 2001. Standards-based reform was supposed to be the answer but as the authors noted:

Standards-based reform … appears to have an ambivalent relationship to the kinds of schooling and teaching that work best for young adolescents, especially those who are most at risk. (p. xii)

And so it was up to (you guessed it) the teachers who found themselves in the middle of a quandary, required to “respond with urgency” to the new reforms while “dealing with the demanding learning needs, complex social worlds, and socially toxic environments” of teenagers. The authors identified three areas of tension for teachers as they wrestled with balancing the requirement to adhere to the new standards-based teaching while their students seemed to need a curriculum with “greater flexibility” which “has meaning for them, connects with their lives, and is grounded in relationships between teacher and students in which each knows each other well” (p. xiii). They said:

* Whereas standards push the curriculum toward detailed central prescription, the needs of today's diverse adolescents call for the flexibility of broader guiding frameworks.

* Whereas standards tend to emphasize common, subject-specialist knowledge, the needs of young adolescents push teachers toward a more contextualized, integrated curriculum that engages learning with young people's lives.

* Whereas standards tend to be externally imposed on teachers and students, the varying and pressing needs of young adolescents push the best teachers toward involving students in defining, interpreting, and being more involved in setting and reaching high standards of learning themselves. (p. xiii)

For over five years, the authors followed a group of Grade 7 and 8 teachers in Ontario, Canada and tracked their “experiences and responses to successive waves of reform”. They discovered that the teachers in the study were all “willing and able” to make “complex and demanding” changes in their classrooms. Their work was not “wholly romantic” and their achievements were not “won easily”. It required “intense intellectual work” and “immense amounts of emotional labour” to interpret policies and principles and “turn them into working realities” in their classrooms.

The Gig?

It seems that, 20 years later, we live in a world where standards-based reform continues its march across the education landscape, infecting every nook and cranny it touches. I think the gig remains the same as it was then - save ourselves and our students. How? By using our hearts, minds, and imagination, and “grounded in relationships between teacher and students in which each knows each other well”, work as intermediaries between the syllabus and the student to bring prescribed standards and outcomes to life by creating learning experiences for each student that are flexible, meaningful, and connected to each student’s life (p. xiii).

The Support

Citing Marsh (1999) and Lieberman & McLaughlin (2000) the authors suggest “a focus on processes of teacher inquiry … and on building professional communities of practice where teachers experience the time, encouragement, and standards-based urgency of working on standards and reform together. […] Moreover, sufficient levels of support and funding for teacher inquiry and collegial discussion to take place in school time are crucial.

Fight for Your Right to Party!

If anything, I’d say the evidence points to an even more orthodox “Orthodoxy of Educational Reform” than 2001 but, thanks to Hargreaves et al, maybe we can pick up the work they set out for us in 2001? We know that making “complex and demanding” changes in our classrooms won’t be “wholly romantic”, and our achievements won’t be “won easily”. It will require “intense intellectual work” and “immense amounts of emotional labour” to interpret policies and principles and “turn them into working realities” in our classrooms. But, we understand, that you’ve gotta fight for your right (to party).

So, let’s come together in community, taking time to share and encourage each other. Who knows, maybe one day the bosses will even find “sufficient levels of support and funding” for this to take place in school time? Until then, I’ll see you online.

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* Revisiting Ken Bruce has gone mad ad. Everyone from Melbourne back in the day was deeply traumatised by these ads…

* Tones Drones and Arpeggios The Magic of Minimalism Part 1

* Tones Drones and Arpeggios The Magic of Minimalism Part 2

* A friend sent me this from Nick Cave on ChatGPT

* John Petrucci, Tosin Abasi, and Devin Townsend on Odd time signatures

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

“In England and Wales, more than a decade of detailed curriculum prescription has left many teachers feeling deprofessionalized, less confident, cynically compliant, and increasingly stressed - to the point that there is now a severe crisis of recruitment into teaching and that sons and daughters of teachers express little interest in joining the profession. Similar teacher recruitment crises also afflict the United States, especially in urban areas. A public (and classroom) image of teaching as highly stressed, overloaded, and increasingly subject to external regulation and control does nothing to help”. (p. 6)

Hargreaves et al., (2001). Learning to change: Teaching beyond subjects and standards. Jossey-Bass.

Ways to work together?

* Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.

* Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.

* Want to get to know me? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hello!

Man, I’ve consumed masses of mass media in the last fifty years or so. So, look out for plenty of Gen X pop culture references (I was born in the “Summer of ‘69”… Oh Yeah!”) if you decide to take this journey with me. Here comes one now…

As I make my way around the education community, I sometimes feel like Elmer J Fudd in one of my favourite Looney Tunes (or was it Merrie Melodies?) cartoons from my childhood. In Rabbit Season, Duck Season, Elmer has to decide if it’s Rabbit Season or Duck season. His decision has dire consequences for Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck who try to convince Elmer they know the answer by yelling at him. Bugs says it’s Duck Season, Daffy says it’s Rabbit Season, and so forth and so on until Elmer makes a choice and BANG! Other times, I feel like I’m Bugs or Daffy, yelling at Elmer, as I try to convince pre-service and/or in-service classroom teachers to think differently (or maybe more like me?) about their teaching. I think I developed this metaphor via my go-to foundation for music education, life, and the universe - Elliott and Silverman’s Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd Edition. They present a line drawing on page 9 and ask if the reader sees a rabbit or a duck (which sets me off into the loop described above) or a myriad of other possibilities.

So why are Fuller, Elliott, and Silverman (see what I did there?) talking about rabbits and ducks? Well, music education has its own Rabbit Season, Duck Season. John Dewey explains it like this, he says:

MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. (1938, p. 23)

Classroom music teachers have layers of these “either-ors” to deal with from education generally and music education specifically. Dewey saw the overarching either-or for educators as the belief that education is “development from within”, “based upon natural endowments” vs “formation from without” through a “process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired under external pressure” (1938, p. 23). In his time, at the dawn of the 20th century, he saw this playing out as traditional vs progressive education. A century later this either-or thinking continues via never ending debates like explicit instruction vs minimal guidance, open vs closed classrooms, knowledge/content rich curriculum vs discovery learning, teacher-directed vs student-directed, technology restricted vs technology rich, et cetera, ad nauseam…

Then, there’s the music education layer, impacted by the overarching either-or and adding a host of subject specific either-ors like classical vs pop, artist vs technician, notation vs aural, electric vs acoustic, canon vs current, aesthetic vs praxial, music 2 vs music 1 (a NSW, Australia thing), formal vs informal, et cetera, ad nauseam…

What’s going on here? Given that Dewey outlined this all pretty carefully in 1938, why haven’t we laid all of this to rest so we can get on with the business of educating the children? DnM (my affectionate nickname for David Elliott and Marissa Silverman), lay it out beautifully in two passages that changed my life and are really the raison d'être for this blog. Why is this so DnM?

Why? Because the most fundamental concepts at the center of our field - music, education, teaching, learning, creativity, listening, performing, curriculum, beauty, art­istry, assessment, and the like-are conceptually, culturally, emotionally, ethically, practi­cally, and politically complex, ambiguous, and ever-changing. This is why philosophers call these terms "essentially contested concepts”. Contested concepts are unstable, "slippery”; culturally situated, and value-laden ideas that resist conclusive definitions and consensus. (p. 9)

So, according to Dewey and DnM, we’re inclined to think in terms of either-ors and our whole operation as music educators rests on either-ors that are “essentially contested concepts”. This explains the “Elmer Fudd Effect™” and why, as music educators, we can so often feel like we’re being shouted at from either side: “It’s Explicit Instruction Season!”, “No, it’s Project-based Learning Season!”, “No it’s Explicit Instruction Season!”, or “It’s Formal Learning Season!”, “No it’s Informal Learning Season!”, “No, it’s Formal Learning Season!”.

And there it is, a pretty compelling reason to start a blog and share it with you. In the land of music education, is it Rabbit Season or Duck Season? Does it have to be either-or? Are there other seasons? Who gets to decide? How? What does this all mean for me and what am I going to do about it? These kinds of questions have directed my research and reflection about music education (and life) for the last decade. I’m going to recount and continue my journey here, and I invite you to join me, in community, in dialogue.

BANG!

💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:

5 things I found interesting this week:

* I heard this bass line in Ascension by Maxwell and thought it was brilliant.

* I found this bookmark that I kept of a blog from one of my students about a lesson concept that Pete and I like to call the BoT Session™ (Back on Track).

* The Pez Outlaw - The guy that forced companies to change their redemption policies by being too good at getting free stuff. What a hero, and is fully in line with the GBL stick it to the man vibe. We’ll do a post in the future about our relationship with Pez.

* I’m using IEMs all the time and found this helpful to improve my own IEM mix - Making IEM Mixes Better: What is Occlusion?

* I’ve told this story to many music classes throughout my career, but really enjoyed this presentation of it - Behind Rock’s Most Iconic Guitar Riff: Deep Purple

💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:

Ways to work together?

* Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.

* Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.

* Want to get to know me? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller

Thanks for reading Gig Based Learning - a substack by Dr Brad Fuller! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.