Participes en el desarrollo del primer infante Fuente: DANE

My journey as a music teacher began and it was a disappointing reality that my way of teaching bore a resemblance to how I was taught at school. My university degree had provided me with some wonderful musical experiences but did little to ensure I understood the pedagogy of teaching that would be effective with a group of primary school children.

They sang action songs, played recorder, and learnt note names from the blackboard. I avidly took ideas and repertoire from old and current publications at the time. I could duly follow the curriculum scope and sequence charts and pat my own back when most of the children were in line with the ‘expected’ musical outcomes at each year level. I told them to sit on their bottoms quietly if they wanted to play the tambourine, and I expected classes of musical devotees and obvious signs of giftedness. That feeling of knowing, as their teacher, that I could ‘reach’ them all, lasted approximately three weeks.

Although the children enjoyed my classes, I knew that this transmission of knowledge way of learning from the teacher to the student was contrary to the joy I had felt in my flute lessons when given the chance to be more creative. As the teacher I wanted to be more creative too—I was bored to death—but felt that the ‘books’ were the experts and must be better than my own intuition. I had no idea how to provide for expression in music that had brought such joy to me. The books seemed to encourage unity, and teaching about

expression was suggested through pictures of fast trains and slow snails. I wondered if classroom music was about the serious learning of what music is, and nothing to do with the joy of expressing yourself through music. The enjoyment the children felt was for the repertoire or musical games, but I believed music education should be more than this.

Teaching in a small school in a community of much older teachers, I felt isolated and unsure of both my abilities and my desires to be a teacher. At a point where these concerns

threatened my continuation in music education, my principal passed me a notice about an upcoming workshop he thought I might be interested in.

I arrived with no preconceptions of what this workshop was going to hold, but desperately hoping it would somehow help me to become a music teacher that could encourage the expressive creativity I so enjoyed.

Christoph Maubach, a German newly arrived from the Orff Institute in Salzburg Austria, stood in the empty space with no shoes on, and very casual clothes. This was clearly not going to be like some ‘traditional’ workshops I had attended. Those had most been

appreciation. At those I would obediently and quietly take notes sitting at the desk. Gazing at Christoph, I remember feeling somewhat anxious about what we would be expected to do, and hoping my musical and teaching inadequacies were not going to be highlighted.

I can still recall more than thirty-five years later exactly what activity we started with and how Christoph conducted the session. We stood in a circle, and already I knew that this was the format I needed with my children—that feeling of a community. Why do children have to sit quietly on bottoms I thought? My own training had been so prescriptive and I lacked the confidence to even consider alternatives. Christoph taught us the traditional folk song Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow and I remember feeling admiration for his ability to say this almost tongue twister when German was his native language. No words were on the board, and yet we learnt it so quickly. He invited us to move—walking and changing direction, or taking various pathways across the room. We all did the task, but were able to do it our own way. It seems so simple and absurd now, but the connection to music and movement, which I had felt all my life, had not ever occurred to me in my teaching of music to children in a school. In fact, the fear of children being ‘out of control’ was enough of a hindrance. I had never experienced this saying of the rhyme and walking before and I was captivated. We created our own music and movement using this text as the impetus. It was genius, and yet I know now that it was the simplest of ideas, executed brilliantly with compassion and care. Christoph sang and moved with us, part of the community. From that first encounter I knew that my music teaching needed to change. Orff Schulwerk resonated with me as if I was born into it. And in certain ways I was. My sense of movement being connected to music; the desire to be creative and expressive; the playing of the xylophone in my fifth grade orchestra; and finally the gifting of Carl Orff’s Musica Poetica vinyl records from my mother which unremembered by me, had been played to my siblings and I when we were young children. These all paved the way to my affinity to Orff Schulwerk. The Princess Anne shoes worn as a child were discarded after this workshop and I have taught barefoot ever since.

From that time on I have reflected continuously on every aspect of my teaching. It has shaped my work and my person since. I realised that expression came from playing around with music and movement and creating music, and that through this, children playing music with others would and could bring a more individualised and expressive self. Through constant trial and error, I found my way through the Schulwerk that I believed offered creative and engaging experiences to children. Some school staff saw the ‘freedom’ in movement I offered and the noisy exploration on instruments, as a sign of poor classroom

management. At times there was conflict in a school between what I believed was good pedagogy and those who saw me as encouraging a lack of discipline, obedience and respect.

Since that first encounter, I have attended and presented many workshops both here and overseas; read publication after publication; talked to as many people as possible; and generally aimed at further developing my understandings of Orff Schulwerk. I have had self-doubt and been self-critical. I have been creative and elicited creativity from others. I have had lots of laughs and joy in being with others learning about music, and about music education. But with this ongoing immersion in Orff Schulwerk came conflicting ideas and models. More and more I have questioned whether my knowledge of the Schulwerk is authentic to what Orff envisaged. With such diversity in the world of Orff Schulwerk, was I now far removed from the essence of Orff Schulwerk? When voicing my doubts about the ‘soundness of my understandings’ to Hartmann (personal communication, October 2014), he replied, “About ‘my knowledge is not sound’: You have a better perception of the

complexity than those who think they would have a sound knowledge. So you have the right questions”. Perhaps it is in the seeking of the answers to questions we never considered questioning—our long-held and tacit knowledge—that we can reflect more deeply on our knowledge and understandings.