Description of sub-theme:
Participants observed the emerging process of being interested and curious about aspects of music therapy and saw this as a naturally occurring and ‘regular’ sort of phenomena that could be characteristic of practice and research. In the context of education this included facilitating the spark of interest in students and guiding and framing their interests. Asking questions and reflecting about practice was considered to be a typical way for this to happen. .
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In the opening to the focus groups, three lecturer participants (one in Group-BA and two in Group-E) raised the idea of curiosity and being awakened or enlivened by an aspect of learning about, or doing practice in their introductory stories about themselves and their interest in the topic of this research study. Their histories were diverse, but they overlapped in this interest and inquiry about their worlds, as they described their development as music therapists. One of the lecturers in Group-E noticed two different kinds of interests in herself as a combined honours psychology and music student,
expressing her joint excitement about numbers, statistics, methodology and ‘puzzles to solve’ in undergraduate psychology alongside the “kind of curiosity and imagination of my
(instrumental/music) teachers”, noting thedifferent flavours of the disciplines with the psychology
examples being very much in the ‘box of research’. Another in Group-BA acknowledged a change in her interests as she developed as a researcher and explored the idea of this“curiosity about
patients’experience” in group discussion as the kind of research in which she has become much more
interested. The third Group-E lecturer participant almost jumped with excitement describing the discovery of a portfolio of articles by a supervisor, embodying the chapter’s ground bass idea of being on fire in the enthusiastic speech:
I read them all night! The sheer intellectual excitement, finally – here is a sense of ideas going together with experience and actually being able to think around my ongoing
experiences as a clinician and being able to put them together with the heritage of the ideas and interdisciplinary ideasand thinking from an informed research perspective about that as well. (Eddie: 130-133)
Interestingly each of these participants in two different focus groups evoked a synergy between research and practice in an immediate way, there was a recognition of different processes (problem- solving, thinking. wondering, alongside active music-making and experiencing in therapy) and the enjoyment of bringing them together was expressed. A fourth Group-E participant later in her group then made a more deliberate connection with training students and explicitly picked up her focus group colleague’s introductory suggestion of curiosity about patients in research as being a particularly valuable and authorising experience for the new student. It validated and underlined creative thinking and confidence in one’s own ideas. This also had particular benefits back into the practical work with patients – the student can make discoveries and test out beliefs but also becomes more vivacious and lively in her own ideas about practice:
I think one of the great benefits of inviting students to do something which we can probably – for this conversation – call “research” is that if it goes well, it encourages a certain kind of curiosity (‘Yes’ murmured by others) a sort of aliveness, rather like you’re saying, thinking about patients which is very much enhanced I think by having that focus, as well as the kind of curiosity you might express in supervision or somewhere else but actually some sort of
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belief or discovery… “I can really think about this, I can really have my thoughts about this...
It might be really useful for me and for my work.” (Catherine: 292-299)
As researcher, I should own up to my attraction to this thematic material – and I should be interested in and working hard at disproving it (in the manner of Yin 2009) as I am aware I might be looking for it. A hint came from my research journal Feb 2012:
I recall writing the documents for the Guildhall Music Therapy programme in 1990s.My previous position for 14 years required that I write such materials. I was always concerned to add in the qualities we were looking for in aspiring therapists, firstly that they be passionate communicators, but following this that they would have a ‘curious questioning attitude’. Finding these kind of ideas in the focus group data has felt quite confirming, but I have to try to not go overboard with this. (RJ, February 18 2012)
However, I was also intrigued that four experienced trainers from different continents, Australasia, Africa, and Europe spontaneously talked about the importance of arousing and working with natural individual curiosity of each person. The ‘repeating bass’ acknowledging curiosity and passionate inquiry seemed to be well-established.
The aliveness that lecturer Catherine (Group-BA) felt was particularly valuable above, was also echoed in an elaborated statement by a researcher-lecturer from Group-E, halfway through the discussion group. This researcher-lecturer, Kirsty, was also thinking (like me in the 1990s) about the attitude of the therapy student, when we begin to consider introducing research – that of being really attentive, ears pricked, senses awake and watchful – really noticing detail in the practice, and keen to look back at what it might mean:
So I suppose if we’re thinking of research, one of the things that we are keen to establish as an attitude is that right from the word go - one is refle-xive, one is reflec-tive as a
practitioner, and that includes being alert and vigilant, to all the possibilities and problems,
at any stage of … the process, and I mean at a kind of macro- as well as on a daily, on-the-
ground level. So if we start thinking about research, the question then is: ‘Well ok how does research fit with, or how is it part of all this? (Kirsty: 313-318)
This participant brought in a linking concept that might be part of both practitioner and researcher language and tasks, the notion of reflection widely acknowledged in the training of practitioners, which creates a natural loop from the awakened curiosity about an issue, into idea, new plans, theorising, testing, new practice, and so on – very much the processes of research. In making sure I understood Kirsty’s perspective in Group-E, I asked for confirmation, that it might be a real
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the curiosity/questioning is necessarily given a context and a shape by the training programme (it is not just random and ‘anything’ but contextualised by teaching and supervision).
Sarah: ‘So kind of, lots of questions, that become an inherent part of everything you do?
Kirsty: A questioning attitude, but also some kind of frame for making sense of it all.’
(Kirsty & Sarah: 324-326)
To summarise then: participants observed that curiosity was awakened and encouraged, and was seen to link easily between practice and research, but also might need to be given focus and direction by the lecturers and supervisors.
Asking questions was also highlighted in the initial stories of some lecturer participants in both extended visits to Site FV and Site KT. It was a slightly less prominent feature generally of these two contexts than in the focus groups, but two individuals at the sites specifically identified this kind of inquiring, questioning approach in themselves, and saw it as an urge and a slightly nagging quality that was hard to resist. A Site FV lecturer offered this thought when invited to ‘start anywhere’ in her
experience. She said right from the beginning of her training she always had felt wary about big claims, “I suppose I’ve always asked questions about how does this work? Why does this work? And wanting to just somehow gain some - evidence for it.”(Hope). In a slightly similar way a Site KT participant observed early on in her interview the sceptical and inquiring approach that drove her along, noting that she didn’t “ever feel that I have an answer to anything… so it’s a hunger for knowledge”. In both cases, this provided a backdrop for their own practice-based research pathways. The programme director at Site KT observed that once their music therapy training programme had converted to Masters’ some years previously, there was a change in student recruitment towards older people, sometimes already parents, with more experience of music and, as she described: “People were like sponges… It was a big ask, theory and clinical methods… But I think it’s working well. My sense is that music therapists are (now) asking more questions. More inquisitive and this adds to
clinical skill…” (Beatrice 287-288)
Another researcher-lecturer participant, Quentin, from Group-E also went on to describe how they aimed, within their teaching groups, to cultivate a questioning approach that actively linked between the practice experienced and the research interests of the student. They “… try to establish a culture
in our seminars…of being truly inquiring, you know, gently but… pointed. So that really encourages
students to actually use the academic seminars as a place to explore something”. This kind of description underlined strongly the potential for integration of processes, as what was described here could easily be thought of a “clinical supervision approach” (where one might encourage the
practitioner to ask questions about what they did in a session and to explore potential strategies) but equally this could be a “research approach” as the students may become very interested in why or how they have experienced something with a client, and wish to document this aspect in detail, or to test a
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theory they have about the phenomenon, and develop a pilot study to explore this.