Chris Philpott

Informal Learning and Meta-Pedagogy in Initial Teacher Education in England.

How do student teachers learn to use informal learning and pedagogy in their teaching? Through focusing on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England, this paper will explore the possibility of developing a meta-pedagogy which embraces informal learning and pedagogy in music. The paper is in two parts, the first of which examines the background to Informal Learning and Pedagogy (ILP) in English music education and some attendant issues surrounding initial teacher education. The second will report on some approaches to developing a meta-pedagogy for ILP in music, before speculating on future areas for research in music ITE. The concepts of ‘living’ and ‘excavating’ learning will be proposed as important meta-pedagogical tools in the process of student teachers learning how to teach music.

A developing discourse in music education: the selected works of Keith Swanwick. By Keith Swanwick

methods that quantitative research and analysis remains essential in evidencing and challenging inequalities. In these chapters, Whitty’s principled pragmatism comes across. He is absolutely clear in outlining and evidencing the ways in which policy fails working class people, yet balances this by discussing examples of how policy has led to real change. Whitty writes that this book is less self-consciously sociological than some of his previous works, and perhaps it is not strictly written within the boundaries of the discipline, yet his sociological lens is clear throughout. Fittingly, then, the final chapter of the book is a plea for the continuing importance of the sociology of education. Whitty reflects here on his life within the sociology of education, and as an early career researcher I find such accounts fascinating – they help make visible the development of fields of study, and the process through which established academics develop their theoretical and methodological approaches and commitments over time. This chapter included a few swipes at progressive educators and postmodern perspectives (the latter accused of ‘extreme relativism’); these felt unnecessary and perhaps less nuanced than the balanced consideration given to certain policies earlier in the book. Nevertheless, this chapter is a welcome call for the sociology of education to be taken seriously – and for sociologists of education to do more to justify their place in the minds of the public. Overall, this is a rigorously researched and highly readable book that makes an important contribution to these aims.

Assessment in music education

Assessment in music education is the latest book in the ‘Oxford Music Education Series’ that is building into a significant body of work in the field. This is a testament to the late Janet Mills who initiated the series and made three important contributions before her untimely death. Furthermore, in commissioning this latest book she not only recognised the need for it, but also that Martin Fautley was the music educator best placed to write such a volume. Professor Fautley has written extensively on this theme in a range of styles from the highly amusing to the polemical and the scholarly. In all cases he comes over with ease and authority; this book is no exception. The need for such a book is indisputable given the problematic relationship that music has had with assessment. For example, how is it possible to summatively assess a composition or performance given their inherent subjectivity? Can the arts be assessed at all? What happens when the politics of accountability brushes with assessment in the arts? Such issues have sometimes paralysed music educators when faced with the need to assess ‘musically’, and Fautley not only takes on these issues (and many others) but deals with them comprehensively and with clarity. In doing so his writing has both gravitas and good humour, with the latter often borrowed from his ‘stand up’ polemics on the abuses of assessment in UK schools; abuses in which the practice of assessment gets in the way of musical learning rather than promoting it. The book has an ambitious and almost encyclopaedic coverage and yet Fautley always locates his many assessment themes in a wider theoretical and practical context. An excellent example of this is his use of Charles Handy to explain McNamara’s fallacy which is particularly pertinent to the conclusion that we should make that which is important assessable rather than that which is easily assessable important. In this sense he does a great job of ‘clearing the decks’, in itself an important and unique project for assessment in music education. For example, early on the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the discourse of assessment by clarifying terminologies. In the chapters that follow he goes on to deal with the why, what and how of summative and formative assessment. The central chapters on integrating assessment into the development of performing, composing, listening and improvising allow Fautley to showcase his belief in the process of formative assessment being fundamental to musical learning. Furthermore, there is a particularly useful and bold chapter on developing criteria for assessment which Music Education Research Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2012, 401 405