Marina R Y Gall

Music composition lessons: the multimodal affordances of technology

This article investigates the multimodal affordances presented by music software and how it can provide new opportunities for students to engage with composition work in the classroom. It seeks to broaden the scope of current research into classroom composition using technology, through a study of students environments and compositional processes as seen from these new perspectives. The authors suggest that there is a need to reconsider the scope of multimodal enquiry in the field of creative music.

The Sub-Culture of Music and ICT in the Classroom.

In this paper the authors utilise findings from the Economic and Social Research Council‐funded InterActive Education project to present a characterisation of the sub‐culture of school music with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in England. They consider the opportunities and challenges ICT presents to the teaching of primary (ages 4–11) and secondary (ages 11–18) classroom music through an investigation of the perceptions, personal philosophies and pedagogical styles of seven teachers with whom they worked over a period of three years. Their work is underpinned by Goodson and Mangan’s definition of subject sub‐culture and they draw on Shulman’s notion of ‘knowledge bases’ in order to categorise and discuss the data. Through the identification and elaboration of key themes, the authors provide a snapshot of the emerging sub‐culture of music and ICT in schools.

Direct and indirect ways of managing epistemic asymmetries when eliciting memories

This article aims to explore how epistemic status is negotiated during talk about the life memories of one speaker. Direct questions which foreground ‘remembering’ can lead to troubled sequences of talk. However, interlocutors sometimes frame their first parts as ‘co-rememberings’, and the sequential positioning of these can be crucial to the outcome of the talk. We draw on almost 10 hours of video data from dementia settings, where memory is a talked-about matter. Our focus is on 30 sequences which are initiated with a question or other first part taking a K-stance, selecting one person as next speaker, and topically relating to the recipient’s past life. We show how type 2 knowables can be used alongside markers of tentativeness, to jointly construct the recipient’s epistemic primacy.