Jonathan Savage

I got two requests today from full-time music teachers wanting to explore the possibility of starting research courses at MMU. Here’s the basic advice I gave them. Maybe it will be helpful to others.
The options at MMU would be:

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The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect a person’s sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

The full text of each volume in the Series is provided for free and open access thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation. The full text of these chapters is openly available here.

Here is some information about a conference on music, identity and social interaction to be held at the RNCM next year. Highly recommended.

If you get a chance, do help out a fellow researcher by completing this survey. Shouldn’t take too long: http://href.hu/x/akmf

It is an online questionnaire on ‘Assessing Creativity in the Arts’. There is an option of receiving the report (with confidentiality guaranteed), and an opportunity to enter a prize draw to win a MP3 player.

Volume 8, Issue 2 of ACT has just been posted to the web. This issue, edited by David Lines, consists of essay reviews of Lucy
Green’s recent book, Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New
Classroom Pedagogy

In addition to Lines’ editorial, the issue includes articles by Lauri
Vakeva (Finland), Carlos Rodriguez (USA), Jean Downey (Ireland), Peter Dunbar-Hall (Australia), Minette Mans (Namibia), Greg Gatien (Canada),
and a response essay by Lucy Green.

If, like me, you believe that there should be a closer link between teaching and research then you’ve probably wondered why more teachers don’t subscribe to our way of thinking and continue to reinvent the wheel in much of what they do. So, it was with considerable interest, that I read this article today. Rebekah Wilson draws on the findings of a recent report published by the NFER
which examined the use of research findings by teachers.  The article highlights some of the barriers that can deter teachers from using research to inform their practice and some of the ways in which local education authorities can help teachers to overcome the barriers to using research. Interesting stuff.

The new issue 8/1 of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education is now available online.

Featured articles in issue 8/1 include:

• Human Needs Theory: Applications for Music Education by Vincent Bates
• Rough Play: Music and Symbolic Violence in an Age of Perpetual War by Randall Allsup
  
• What Music Isn’t and How to Teach It by Arnold Berleant
• Curriculum Reform: Reclaiming Music as Social Praxis by Thomas Regelski
• Music Education and Community: Reflections on Webs of Interaction in School Music by Hildegard Froehlich

In the RAE results released today, it was great to see MMU ranked in 10th place in respect of its educational research. Not quite sure what an average of 2.650 means but all will become clear in March 2009 when the funding mechanism for research in the UK is announced, and we’ll find out how much research funding each institution will receive. But according to the figures today, the Institute of Education is the highest ranked research faculty within MMU. Congratulations to Harry and the team!

The journal Music and Arts in Action (MAiA) emerges from international, cross-disciplinary work that takes a wider, holistic approach in researching the dynamic role of music and the arts in social life and cultural experience. Cutting-edge work in this area considers how aesthetic experiences and artistic forms are unconsciously, semi-consciously and actively used by individuals and groups to structure social relations, situations, environments and action. Simply put, how, when and where do music and art do something, how do music and art matter?