‘I don't know where it's found I don't mind
As long as the world spins around I'll take my time’
‘In search of a rose’, The Waterboys
Initial plans: Prior to candidature, I had been a lecturer and coordinator in a contemporary music degree at Victoria University for ten years. Over that time my colleagues and I had strived to prepare and teach quality music curriculum for our students. We had generally high retention and completion rates and quantitative data collection and analysis administered by the university was generally positive from year to year. In contrast I had observed many students who did not appear to be enjoying their studies. I met with a seemingly never- ending stream of students in my office with a dizzying array of challenges, gripes and complaints. I became interested in exploring the inconsistencies apparent in the quantitative data and my own observations and experiences. I also reasoned that a greater understanding of the student experience might help to inform the continuing development of tertiary music curriculum and pedagogy in the university. I was attracted to the idea that I need not necessarily pursue the absolute answer, or outcome, of the challenges and experiences of music students, but rather value the process of exploring their stories
This process required the design of a method to investigate the problem. I had a rudimentary understanding about the distinctive properties and functions of qualitative and quantitative fields. I spoke with colleagues, and later my supervisors, about the nature of the problem and how best to investigate it. I decided that qualitative methodology was the most appropriate field of inquiry. I felt also intuitively (but, in retrospect, without solid or detailed reasoning) that
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this was the preferred method, not only because it suited the nature of the investigation, but because it seemed to sit most comfortably with me. I had read and thought about some interesting qualitative research in music education and there were important connections I made with the research I wanted to conduct. Roulston’s (2006, p. 155) assertion that ‘qualitative researchers are involved in knowledge construction to examine meanings from participants’ perspectives, with findings emerging from data analysis in a inductive or bottom up, rather than a deductive or top down way’ resonated with me. Milne et al. (2006) have utilised qualitative methodology in researching general themes of transition within the wider Victoria University student population (partly in order to employ an alternative investigative perspective to the plethora of statistical data and interpretation). I felt a qualitative approach might provide a clearer, or at least additional, sense of the more specific music student experience at Victoria University. I reasoned that this research might add to other research findings that highlight processes and structures that contribute to sustaining a satisfying university experience for all students.
I was interested by Burland and Pitts’ (2007) qualitative investigations into students transitioning into the first year of higher education music. Like me, they appeared to be focused on attempting to really understand the challenges that music students face. They also sought to explore various academic and social measures to assist students and improve the learning experience. Regarding the appropriateness of qualitative research in the educational field, it has been commented that ‘educators have welcomed the richer and more varied insights into educational settings that qualitative research produces’ (Kervin et al., 2006 p. 37) and that ‘for educators, this type of (applied) research is more common as teachers want to know which strategies will enhance the learning of their students’ (ibid, p. 39). Research into music students and music education in the Australian context by Lebler (2008, 2007), Sefton-Green (2006) and Schippers (2007), among others, utilised qualitative approaches to explore the student experience in contemporary music education. Their work particularly centred on innovative, student centred curricular and pedagogical thinking.
The nature and problems of the (music) educational context at Victoria University have always appeared to me to be both complex and multi-faceted.
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Kervin et al. (2006) emphasised that qualitative research was more aligned to building knowledge, more suitable for natural cultural settings and was more comfortable with a range of viewpoints and ideas. Indeed ‘the qualitative approach draws on phenomenology, which is the belief that our worlds are independent, messy and unique. Therefore a qualitative researcher aims to understand this complexity rather than to uncover a ‘knowable truth’ (Kervin et al., 2006, p. 35).
Reflections: I tackled and completed the Confirmation of Candidature process, satisfying the initial requirements for the doctoral qualification. However, I experienced the process of application to graduate study as almost clinical. Things had to be done in an ordered and structured way. Quite possibly I belonged to that part of the graduate student population that experienced ‘traditional academic inquiry (as) a particularly sterile and dispassionate process’ (Montuori, 2005, p. 388). I also began to feel anxious about the expectations of the doctoral process. I felt I was supposed to ‘know’ everything about: the wider area of research; my specific context; where my research was situated in the field and wider literature; what methodological paradigm and data collection methods would best suit my inquiry; specific questions that would best suit the investigation, and have a reasonable set of hypotheses about what I’d find. Thus before I had asked any students (or indeed myself) anything about the issue that had sparked the investigative process, I felt I was expected to know it all. I had to be sure enough to convince a panel of supervisors and other (legitimate) academics that I knew what I was doing, that what I proposed had ‘academic merit’ and would be a ‘contribution to knowledge’. Although I was able to satisfy the academic requirements for entry into the doctoral program I actually felt distinctly unknowledgeable and illegitimate.
Additionally, my intention to investigate the experiences of students was not a purely altruistic endeavour. There was at the time another, hidden, reason for undertaking the process. I had begun my career as a High School music teacher, moved into tertiary music education at a Classical music conservatorium and now found myself as a music academic in a small part of a very large university. I had an unnerving sense of pressure that I’d better undertake and complete a PhD pretty quickly otherwise I was not going to get
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ahead (or even keep my position..?). I was reluctant to admit this thinking to anyone (or even myself) because it seemed hollow or expeditious.
I also struggled to reconcile my roles as a music teacher and soon to be music researcher with my identity as a musician. The pressures of full time teaching and coordinating resulted in less time and space for musicicking. As my roles changed I was challenged by the competing demands of music education theory and music practice. The functional musician self was becoming diluted. The sometimes formulaic requirements of my work resulted in a sense of lost creativity. I worried that that in a job where music proficiency was paramount (for both general competency and credibility) I was losing the music in me. In retrospect this was the beginning of a narrative; a narrative that ran beside the research journey throughout its completion. This narrative served to provide some challenging moments of anxiety and doubt about my capacities as an academic, teacher, researcher and musician. Writing now, as I complete the final stages of this thesis, it seems entirely reasonable (even somewhat obvious) that I did not ‘know it all’ as I began the process. I realise now that I was not meant to understand the complexities and nuances of the research process. I could not have known that this space of not knowing is what we as teachers often find difficult and that encountering a sense of discontent is what often drives us to move forward with our quest for new knowledge and ways of being as both a teacher, researcher, musician and academic
Perhaps for some the learning about methodology and the research process does take place as they read, think about and discuss their proposals for graduate research. However it is interesting to reflect upon my teachable moments in qualitative research as I have undertaken this process, particularly those that imbue within me a sense of the relevance and value of qualitative inquiry to this study and, more generally, as a field of inquiry. My candidature story is also a small and personal attempt to share what Montouri (2005, p. 387) calls the ‘interpersonal messiness’ that is so often part of the research and inquiry process.
This candidature has provided valuable learning (via other teachable moments) about my agency and my identity. I have worked through the whole process
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within the challenges of anxiety and doubt. I have learned that I am not alone in dealing with such feelings. Completing this work has provided a sense of power and achievement, despite the challenges. I realise now that there will always be uncertainty, and that not knowing is all part of my journey.
Qualitative research has been a contested and complex paradigm of enquiry with multiple historical phases. It has been defined as ‘a situated activity that locates the observer in the world…(that) consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible…(and that) transforms the world’ (2011, p. 3). This description resonated loudly with me and sharpened my focus on the nature and role of qualitative inquiry. In the current context I came to understand that one of my worlds was the part of the university where I work to teach music to students. Setting out on this research journey I viewed qualitative inquiry as a useful method to effectively try to solve a puzzle. On reflection however, the qualitative model has prompted me to write into this thesis and has allowed me to see, be in and want to make better, this world. This process has allowed me to reflect upon who I am and what I have to say within the music education research community. I’ve learned that my voice, experience and interpretation of the music arena is valid and worthy of being made public.
Denzin and Lincoln (2011, p. 3) assert that contemporary qualitative research ‘asks that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalisation, freedom and community’. My investigative process began as a decidedly small and localised study of my students’ musical lives and study experiences. Indeed these findings discuss a small sample size and only speak on behalf of the participants in this study. However, all our stories related and explored herein form part of the wider field of qualitative research that aims to continue ‘big’ discussions. Qualitative inquiry has been a highly effective paradigm in which to investigate the communities of the students studying at Victoria University and, by extension, to gain a more generalised understanding of the nature and characteristics of music communities, particularly as they relate to higher education institutions. Qualitative methodology employed here has led to discussions about how common aspects of community, such as
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music creativity and function, might be incorporated into formal music education. Qualitative methodology has prompted a conversation about how agency and choice might assist in understanding and challenging traditional notions of power and limitation within the formal music education fields. I came to appreciate this as student after student related instances of passivity and powerlessness in their educational experiences. The qualitative lens has led to an exploration of the nature and meaning of power from the ‘on the ground’ players in the field – students and teachers. The qualitative perspective allowed for a continued exploration of how the music student experience might be improved.
My formal education training highlighted the importance of the teacher as a reflexive and critical practitioner. The undertaking of research within the qualitative paradigm has taught me how I might become such a teacher. I was absorbed by the work of Kincheloe et al. (2011, p. 166) on the critical teacher, proposing that ‘all teachers need to engage in a constant dialogue with students, a dialogue that questions existing knowledge and problematises the traditional power relations that have served to marginalise specific groups and individuals’ . Meaningful conversations made possible via the qualitative paradigm enable teachers to learn about their students, understand their complex and personal worlds and to assist them to deal with the multiple challenges these worlds present. Conversations have opened up an exploration and understanding of how students negotiate and perceive themselves in the fields they inhabit. Traditional power dynamics within the educational field impact upon the learning and well-being of students and warrants further examination. This dialogue is valuable for the teacher also.
This research contributes to balancing qualitative inquiries with widespread ongoing quantitative investigation taking place within Victoria University and the Higher Education sector more generally. Quantitative research has become, and is utilised as part of, the dominant investigative and policy tool in the Higher Education sector because this method best serves the conceptualisation of educational institutions as ‘vocational schools and research shops’ (Levin and Greenwood, 2011, p. 27) .
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Rankings for both teaching and research dominate the higher education landscape. Students, sometimes even referred to as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’, are surveyed constantly throughout their education as part of an attempt to collect, collate and advertise ‘quality’ and achievement. Disciplines of study are evaluated quantitatively as to their value, often via the actual number of students choosing to enter the discipline area. Student learning is often assessed numerically and student learning outcomes are routinely measured by reference to unit and course completion rates. McMahon (2009) argues that the quantitative measurement used to analyse student outcomes and drive institutional policy-making fails to account for the large amount of social (as opposed to purely formal, or ‘knowledge’) capital that students accrue through their university experiences. Levin and Greenwood (2011, p. 37) define students possessing this kind of capital as ‘critical, well informed and reflective intellectuals able to address societal problems with integrity’. Qualitative inquiry can assist in the exploration of the nature and potential for this type of capital within education. In a localised way the qualitative lens has helped to identify the complex social, reflective, creative and interpersonal skills that Victoria University music students have accrued throughout their music education. This knowledge is in addition to formal music knowledge that they have previously acquired.
Another way of conceiving a need for balance in approaches to inquiry might be to acknowledge the need for both insider and external views of a given context, so that ‘researchers might assert that their insider position allowed them to have insights that outsiders could not…’(Pelias, 2003, p. 663). The quantitative measuring of the student experience is often undertaken by the wider university bureaucratic apparatus, operating outside the specific area of study. The evaluation of quality in, and even importance of, entire discipline areas is sometimes administered by third party educational consultants who operate independently of the loci they are investigating. Although an external approach to investigation lends the characteristic of objectivity associated particularly with quantitative methodology, it does not follow that this should be the only approach driving the understanding and decision making within educational contexts. My insider qualitative exploration has allowed me to understand
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important aspects of the student world(s) that statistical data does not provide. The qualitative paradigm has also promoted an insider, self-dialogue about me as a teacher, researcher, musician and person that contrasts to the external evaluative gaze of the institution and educational field.
As I have indicated, I came to write this methodology chapter as the penultimate chapter of the thesis. Having theorised at the outset about how I would investigate the problem I was now able to reflect on how I had actually gone about it all. Did I utilise the field of qualitative research in the way that I had planned to when setting out on this journey? Did my investigative process really qualify as ‘qualitative’ research and if so, was it employed appropriately for the circumstances? The choice of the qualitative paradigm to collect and view my data sounded simple and straightforward at the beginning but, reflecting as I attempted to write this chapter, the whole journey seemed messy, unruly and highly resistant to definition and description. So it was both revelatory and emancipatory for me to read Erickson’s (2011, p. 56) depiction of the role and nature of qualitative inquiry to explore the ‘subtle poetics of everyday social life – it’s rhyming, the nonliteral, labile meanings inherent in social action, the unexpected twists and turns that belie prediction and control’. Thus I realised that qualitative inquiry was almost necessarily messy, like the frustrations, surprises, disappointments and breakthroughs that marked my journey.
I came to understand that the qualitative paradigm was particularly well suited to exploring musicians and music education. Denzin and Lincoln (2011, p. 4) compared qualitative inquiry with ‘…Jazz, which is improvisation, creates the sense that…sounds…and understandings are blending together, overlapping and forming a composite, a new creation.’ The voices in this enquiry have been recorded and then mixed together in chorus to sound a new composition, a new creation. These narratives are the composite of many layers and twists and rises and falls, that contract and expand, tense and release, just as dynamic variation operates in the music score. This qualitative investigation, like a piece of music, does not offer definite answers to the initial research questions but rather invites further listening and exploration and seeks to result in further questioning?
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I had read about the merits and applications of qualitative research but had not thought deeply about the nature of quantitative research. Further exploration and understanding of important distinctions between the qualitative/quantitative paradigms, and gaining some insight into the paradigm wars that had raged for decades, allowed me to explain my initial intuition. I not only recognised these tensions in qualitative inquiry literature and music education communities but felt instantly aligned with ‘more humanistic approaches’ Montouri (2005, p. 390). I was drawn to the idea that ‘the word qualitative implies an emphasis on the qualities of entities and on processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured (if measured at all) in terms of quantity, amount, intensity, or frequency’ and that the paradigms might be characterised as ‘exploration versus confirmation’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, p. 7). I came to identify with the qualitative researcher (who) first asks ‘what are the kinds of things (material and symbolic) to which people in this setting orient as they