Grabación

As well as interview transcripts, I also had around seven hours of lesson

observations to consider. Many of the issues surrounding the audio recording of interviews also apply to video evidence, albeit in somewhat modified form: for example, how the sample was selected, what effect my self-presentation might have had on proceedings, and the extent to which the resulting data is a local ʻperformanceʼ or truly representative of the ʻrealityʼ of their teaching.

It could be said that, since I didnʼt personally know any of the students, and barely met most of them (two of Daveʼs students I didnʼt meet at all), I am therefore scarcely present in the lesson observations and cannot have

significantly affected the interactions between teacher and student. However, I would offer two qualifications to this notion.

Firstly, although I was not present in the room while the lesson was going

on, my camera certainly was, and it is impossible to tell what difference this might have made. There is clearly a logical problem here: ʻhow do we know what the behaviour would have been like if it hadnʼt been observed? (Robson, 2002: 311). Both teacher and student would inevitably have felt some pressure to ʻperformʼ while being so obviously under observation.

Secondly, while I asked to see ʻordinary lessonsʼ, I cannot know what they took that to mean. As already mentioned, I left the choice of students up to the teachers themselves. Inevitably all the participants will have thought carefully about who to show me and what they wanted me to see; they were surely unlikely, for example, to have chosen their least able or interested pupils for observation. When I thought about who I would select from among my own students for observation in a similar project, I realised that I would want to choose pupils that I liked, and who I could be fairly sure would ʻbehaveʼ, pay attention, make reasonable attempts to do what I asked them, and so on. On the other hand, if I were invited to take part in a project explicitly investigating, for example, the problems and frustrations of instrumental teaching, I would pick different students to display. Indeed, several teachers remarked on their choice of students for the observation in terms that made it clear they were consciously choosing exceptional or unusual lessons to show me (see section 4.6).

Moreover, given that an instrumental teacherʼs work involves personal

interaction with a variety of students with different abilities and ambitions, there can surely be no such thing as a typical lesson. A single hour of teaching is obviously a limited example, but it would take a longitudinal study beyond the reaches of the present project to observe anything like every aspect of

someoneʼs teaching practice. Inevitably I was viewing a very brief glimpse of a much bigger picture.

The fact that video evidence includes non-verbal cues presents added

complexity, and early attempts at analysis showed that it was certainly possible to code or categorise the films in different ways. For example, it would be

possible to analyse the video tapes in terms of, say, the physical interaction and body language of teacher and pupil. However, while such issues are certainly relevant to teaching practice, it seemed to me that to focus on such ʻlocalʼ interactions would be to distract from issues both more mundane and more far- reaching: for example, how much time they and their pupils spent practising scales, picking out parts by listening, or using notation. This information is to some extent interesting in its own right, since so little is known about the

specific teaching practices of popular musicians. Moreover, the participants may have talked about a particular teaching practice in the interview: now we can

see them actually do it. Certainly, to map such activities and the extent to which they occurred directly onto the interview data would be to afford undue weight to a single example of teaching practice. Nevertheless, the ʻfitʼ between interview and lesson observation demands at least some attention.

Equally, the manner in which these teachers go about their work - for

example, how demanding they are, how they deal with mistakes, or how they offer advice - may be data which cannot be gleaned from the interviews, and should also not be overlooked. Thus some of the problems in dealing with my interview data apply equally to the video data; am I witnessing an ʻauthenticʼ example of what they really do as teachers, or rather a context-specific performance enacted for my benefit? I would argue that, just as in the

interviews, the research ʻframeʼ around the data collection cannot and should not be ignored; nevertheless, the films do record instrumental lessons, and there is undeniably some teaching, learning and playing going on. Moreover, every social interaction has some kind of frame around it; a ʻlessonʼ is always to some extent a performance, even if the audience is usually just the teacher and student themselves. Certainly a single one hour film cannot completely

represent a teacherʼs working practice, and must be to some extent ʻstagedʼ for the purposes of observation, but this does not mean it should be disregarded.

Each video was initially transcribed as a timeline, a form of event coding (Robson, 2002: 334) which outlined the durations of the various activities on display. These activities were coded thematically in a very similar way to the interview transcriptions, and in many cases using the same themes that had emerged from the interviews. For example, the films offer examples of the way notation and recordings were used, and some indications as to whether the teacher or student was in control of the learning agenda. Thus direct

comparisons can be made between the videos and the interviews. Themes also emerged from the lesson observations which had not arisen in the interviews; for example, the pacing of lessons, or the standards of playing (or effort) expected by the teachers, and these are considered as data in their own right. Since the activities on film took place within the confines of lessons, the video data are considered as teaching practice and are discussed in section 4.6.