Description of sub-theme:
Participants contributed ideas about the way that professional language in music therapy had evolved in their experience of the discipline. It was observed that language in MT and other disciplines is changing and evolving all the time. It was noted how language could shape thinking and the value of making this process transparent was highlighted in one area of the data. In particular, definitions of ‘research’ weree offered and critiqued particularly in relation to the kind of research undertaken as part of training. What kind of research was considered valuable for students to pursue ? This question was debated widely across the groups and sites.
Evolution in language could be considered as a kind of barometer of the process of change in a discipline (as evidenced in this study). Participants observed this in explicit and more subtle ways in the groups and sites and it was an important area of discussion between people in both focus groups. Focus Group-E brought the idea of language centre-stage in this research process. One lecturer participant was thinking about it in a very deliberate way as she introduced herself, particularly when considering teaching students, by emphasising how collections of terms relate to theories and
ideologies of work (explicitly and covertly). She described a process of consciousness-raising:
…getting students to consider the kind of language that they are using, and what frame that language comes from , and the kind of ideology and - in a way - the ‘oppression’ , behind it, you know that it can really limit how we think and how we speak, and how that influences what we do. (Kirsty 88-90)
This kind of exploration of language became an important way to reveal and compare different theoretical approaches to music therapy for Group-E. The participants illustrated ways they have evolved in their teaching programme to help students become familiar with different terminologies and how they relate to traditions of practice. My own thinking also evolved as a result of this interaction in the focus group. I was aware of being rather naïve previously, and looking back over interview transcripts, I became much more consciously aware of how different participants identified their theoretical position and practice approach through the language they used. A psychodynamic background was indicated by use of such terms as ‘disturbance of self’ and ‘schizoid split’, a social constructionist position by ‘power relationships between therapist and client’ and interest in ‘reflexivity’ and a more positivist research training was suggested by the term ‘taking data’ and
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developing hypotheses about practice. I had registered this before, but it was valuable to think specifically about the language:
As researcher I had a very interesting personal reaction to this a little later in Group-E,
when I was talking about clinical practice and clinical seminars for students where work on placements is reviewed and discussed. Kirsty raised my awareness of the use of ‘clinical’ which has become a training habit for me. We talked about being clinicians and being practitioners and I realised that I had used them interchangeably and tended to refer to
‘clinicians’ specifically when I was considering training issues. Our supervision groups at
the Guildhall school were called ‘Clinical Seminar and I realised how – by default – I was
using a medical model for the language, whereas my own practice had gradually become more influenced over the years by humanistic and psychodynamic thinking. Maybe I had evolved in my own thinking, whilst my institutional language stayed the same. It was
fascinating to be made more aware. I made a conscious choice to change my research title to educating practitioners/ from educating clinicians. Here was language evolving before my eyes. (RJ 30th Jan 2010)
I cross-reference here a point made by Bella at Site FV about student’s acquiring of language (see section 6.2.5 ‘Finding confidence’). This lecturer observed that students’ own personal use of research language grows in their learning on a music therapy programme. They have more vocabulary and thus they change in their ability to articulate and perceive the work they are doing. This is a
complementary observation made to Kirsty’s earlier in this section where lecturers might familiarise students with the different ‘language’ of theories, and giving confidence to use and interpret such theories.
The term ‘research’ itself sparked an ongoing debate between group members in the two focus groups, and then continued on in the specific site visits. This felt to me as researcher, a very pertinent aspect of observing the evolution of language and concepts for a discipline – particularly in the context of the present study concerning the involvement of students in research activity. The way that
research is conceived in music therapy has clearly changed in recent years, according to participants, and how this applies to students was raised on a number of levels.
Site KT researcher participant Alex noted the change in the kinds of research she could practically be funded to undertake over the years, and was relieved and proud that her own contributions might have contributed to growing acceptance of qualitative methods for vulnerable participants. Alex and lecturer-researcher Anna (Site FV) both pointed out examples in their interviews of where the
language of qualitative research fitted easily with student’s work in practice settings. They both talked (in slightly different ways) about reflection and developing practice wisdom as being a strong part of their own research journeys and their understanding and personal conception of research as applied to
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student work seemed centred around these concepts. Site KT researcher-lecturer Bella’s fascination with ‘pattern and meaning’ also seemed to link clearly with qualitative research concepts.
All the Group-BA participants alluded to the definition of research in the way they articulated their experiences. Some group members demonstrated powerful change in themselves in a most interesting exchange. This began with experienced researcher Zelda’s story where she reflected on her own thinking about research and noticed that she began her career trying to ‘really make it more strict and
then now I’m in this … more “loose” or flexible definition of research’. Initially she never thought of
‘taking data’ as being anything other than clinical evaluation, but now had changed her thinking
somewhat to be able to redefine such activity (the taking of data) as a kind of pre-experimental design although she expressed the observation that she ‘continues to feel quite confused’ ( 104-152).
However Zelda also expressed frustration that people could try to describe almost anything they did to document their work as ‘research’, which she felt had an undermining effect on the quality of studies attributed to the discipline. She said “that really makes me crazy because I think then we never raise
our standards for what we are really talking about” and in this way, too loose a definition of research
had its problems for her. Recent graduate Paloma responded to the expression of confusion about how research is defined in the music therapy field. She described the experience of writing her masters’ thesis vividly (as noted in the previous chapter section 4.2.7) : it ‘made my brain very grey … mush-
like’ and later echoed the colour metaphor, saying ‘research as a word is very grey and I could not
define it, like you say, so many people coming with different definitions… It’s quite confusing…”
(160-177). Lecturer-researcher, Hannah made a more specific association with the way her ideas about what constituted research have changed over the years of being a clinician and researcher:
I think what Zelda said really resonated with me… how does it link with clinical practice?
Because actually I did many evaluations of my clinical practice before I ever started researching – that I never would have called research. They were just evaluation they were
part of your responsibilities as a clinician to really understand if you’ve set these goals and objectives - if you think you are doing this – are you actually doing it? But later, I’ve reflected on and thought actually - that’s foundational to research. (Hannah 220-226) Hannah further elaborated on “this idea of this curiosity about patients’ experience” as the kind of research in which she has become much more interested. 27 Finally Catherine, lecturer participant picked up this thread at a slightly later point in discussion by articulating that (from the discussion) there might be two ways that research can be understood.
On one level we are talking about the need for research… to demonstrate something about
efficacy or good practice … in other words how we might present research to the world, and
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the other is something about the relationship within the clinician between research and
practice. [The process of students researching]… encourages a certain kind of curiosity
(Hannah murmurs ‘Yes’)… a sort of aliveness… which is very much enhanced I think by
having that focus’. (Catherine 289-297)
Group-E members played with the idea of the term ‘research’ perhaps not being very helpful as applied to student training, with one person wondering “is research too broad a term?” In discussion together they suggested that – for the purposes of student learning – a day-to-day practice-linked definition could encompass instead the ‘search for meaning’ combining curiosity and reflection on placement experiences. Alongside this there might be a more external process of learning about ‘Research Methodology’. In this way, perhaps Group-E’s ideas were allied to those summarised by the Group-BA lecturers above. Certainly they identified a kind of practical researching process that appeared to resonate with lecturer Catherine’s curiosity and aliveness. They described having abandoned the time of a formal written thesis as the research requirement on their programme. They now used a more varied collection of research-related tasks, which were not isolated as the ‘research component’ but built into and extending from practice documentation and analysis. In this way they recognised that bringing in research was not just importing this ‘thing’ – the thesis, nor embarking on completely separate activity - undertaking the research skills work, but building and weaving it into the structure of practitioner learning. For this department, integration of research and practice seemed to be established comfortably through these steps.
It was interesting that further questioning of whether “research is the right word?”for what it is that students did (raised in Group-BA), continued at Site FV. The senior student participant who asked this went on to observe a disparity between being a very effective clinician and “having the academic and
research side” – perhaps suggesting in her narrative that possibly they were being forced together in
the programme? Terms as part of, or instead of ‘research’ that came up a lot in the language of this site during my visit were ‘evaluation and audit’ and the same student participant said:
I think it’s important for everybody to be able to present music therapy on an evidential basis cause we’ve got to compete for money, [That]is the bottom line. And that needs to be
convincing and [have] reasoned and balanced arguments. So I think …evaluating, efficacy and effectiveness …should be part of everyone’s practice and then understanding the different methods for different aspects of that. (Florence979-984)
This raised an inevitable question about the definitions we use for ‘research’ when incorporating research activities and learning in training programmes, as identified in the literature review and in focus Group-BA). Language and definition may act as a barrier or as something divisive or
challenging. What the music therapy department means by ‘research’ at one site may be identified differently by another health department. In received documentation, the language of one of the
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modules - Research Methodologies - which Site FV music therapy department borrowed from another area of health and social science research (when outlining critical appraisal skills to be gained by students, mentioned in section 5.2.7 ) appeared to echo the hierarchy of evidence in EBP (see literature review).
x Evaluating intervention research (experimental and quasi-experimental research; randomised controlled trials; action research; descriptive and inferential statistics including both
parametric and non-parametric approaches)
x Evaluating survey research
x Evaluating qualitative research (open interviews, discourse and content analysis, observational research)
x Evaluation criteria: reliability, validity; issues of corroboration; triangulation
And so the context in which research was being considered seemed to start from the medical model of intervention. Qualitative research, in the third bullet point, does not have a consideration of the arts or arts process in its examples – of course there is no particular reason why it should – but by various participant reports, the shared modules were experienced as particularly problematic by the
department.