Pamela Burnard

Musical Creativities in Practice

1. Conceptions 2. Myths 3. Originals Bands 4. Singer-Songwriters 5. DJ Cultures 6. Composed Musics 7. Improvised Musics 8. Interactive Audio Designs 9. A Framework for Understanding Musical Creativity 10. Pedagogy and learning with Musical Creativities

How Children Ascribe Meaning to Improvisation and Composition: Rethinking pedagogy in music education

This paper is taken from doctoral research which sought to discover how children engage in and reflect on their experiences of improvising and composing. The study was carried out at a comprehensive Middle School in West London where 18 self-selected 12-year-old children participated in weekly music making sessions. Data collected over a six-month period included observations, interviews and the examination of musical artefacts. This paper reports on interview methodology based on constructivist elicitation tools to understand how children ascribe meaning to improvisation and composition. It was found that children represented these phenomena in three ways: (i) distinct forms distinguished by bodily intention; (ii) interrelated forms co-existing functionally in context; and (iii) inseparable processes. The pedagogical significance of what is under description here will be discussed.

Long-term musical group interaction has a positive influence on empathy in children:

Musical group interaction (MGI) is a complex social setting requiring certain cognitive skills that may also elicit shared psychological states. We argue that many MGI-specific features may also be important for emotional empathy, the ability to experience another person’s emotional state. We thus hypothesized that long-term repeated participation in MGI could help enhance a capacity for emotional empathy even outside of the musical context, through a familiarization with and refinement of MGI empathy-promoting musical components (EPMCs). We tested this hypothesis by designing an MGI programme for primary school children consisting of interactive musical games implementing various EPMCs. We ran the programme for an entire school year and compared the emotional empathy of MGI children to control children using existing and novel measures of empathy before and after the programme. Our results support our hypothesis: MGI children showed higher emotional empathy scores after the study compared to its beginning, and higher scores than control children at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional processes involved in musical interaction and highlight the remarkable potential of MGI for promoting positive social-emotional capacities such as empathy.

Creativity and performativity: counterpoints in British and Australian education

This article explores the complex interplay of power between performativity and creativity agendas—a mutual tension that resides in British and Australian education. Accountability constraints and conflicting policy debates are problematised against the wider imperatives of similar government agendas. This ‘counterpoint’ of freedom and control has significant implications for pedagogy and, through accommodating performativity, teacher agency and professionalism are under threat. The authors propose a ‘rebalancing’ where pedagogy transforms from a site of struggle for control, to one where a higher trust is placed in teacher professionalism. The idea of ‘rebalancing pedagogy’ offers a way for teachers to navigate and be supported through the opposing demands of performativity and creativity. It acknowledges the importance of teacher agency and where teaching is judged against the characteristics of a systemic approach that facilitates the building of creative learning communities capable of supporting any ...

Problem-Solving and Creativity: Insights from Students' Individual Composing Pathways.

Music educators are particularly keen to offer learning opportunities that enhance creativity. How this happens remains something of a mystery. Within an international context, this article reports on a study that used a cross-cultural perspective on creative thinking with a particular focus on examining the link between problem-solving and composing. The study compares the individual composing pathways of a sample of students drawn from a range of data sets that tracked students’ thinking as they composed, in terms of the ways in which problems were perceived, framed and solved. Several common themes were identified across students’ musical backgrounds, age and cultures from Australia, Canada and the UK. One such theme with educational implications was that perceiving a compositional problem and seeking solutions utilize different types of thinking.

Examining experiential differences between improvisation and composition in children's music-making

This article focuses on childrens experiences of differences between improvising (i.e. creating spontaneous single-event performances) and composing (i.e. creating revised pieces). Eighteen self-selected children participated from a multi-ethnic, comprehensive Middle School in West London. Twenty-one weekly music-making sessions were conducted over a period of six months. A model mapping qualitatively different ways of experiencing improvisation and composition is presented using data drawn from the analysis of in-depth interviews, observation and recorded performances. The categories also form the arrangement of a model where improvising and composing are distinguished as being orientated towards (i) time, (ii) body, (iv) relations and (iv) space. These findings can be applied to the development of a pedagogy, which challenges some of the assumptions about what it is (and can be) to improvise and compose.

Documenting 'possibility thinking': a journey of collaborative enquiry

Drawing on existing work in the area of creativity and early years education, this paper maps the process of an exploratory study which sought to identify what characterizes ‘possibility thinking’ as an aspect of creativity in young children’s learning. With the aim of developing a framework for identifying ‘possibility thinking’ in the contexts of three early years settings, the authors explore key tenets of a model for conceptualizing (and rethinking) ‘possibility thinking’ and attempt to reconcile some of the methodological challenges inherent in documenting this aspect of creativity in early years contexts. With the co‐participation of five early years teachers as researchers, three university‐based researchers worked collaboratively, in a funnel‐like process, over the three‐phase development of the project. With the emphasis on mapping the developing conceptualizations of ‘possibility thinking’ and the appropriateness of multimodal methods in naturalistic enquiry, the research team explicates and argues the need for sharing methodological approaches in researching young children’s thinking. The data arising from this research provide powerful insights into the characteristics of ‘possibility thinking’ which most successfully promote creativity, and the authors conclude with a consideration of the implications for future research, practice and practitioner research in early years contexts.

Trainee primary-school teachers’ perceptions of their effectiveness in teaching music

In England, there have been concerns that some primary teachers lack the necessary skills to teach the National Curriculum. The aim of this research was to ascertain the level of confidence of students completing a one-year primary teacher-training programme in relation to teaching in general and teaching music in particular. 341 students from four higher education institutions in England completed a short questionnaire. While almost all teachers had confidence in their ability to teach, only about half were confident about teaching music. There were statistically significant differences in response depending on whether the students played one or more musical instruments. Instrumentalists were more confident, those playing more than one instrument exhibiting the highest levels. Most students believed that more time should be spent on training, although they praised its quality. The implications of the findings are discussed and alternative ways of addressing the problem are considered.

Question-Posing and Question-Responding: The Heart of "Possibility Thinking" in the Early Years.

Drawing on research that sought to explore the characteristics of ‘Possibility Thinking’ as central to creativity in young childrens learning, this paper considers question‐posing and question‐responding as the driving features of ‘Possibility Thinking’ (PT). This qualitative study employed micro‐event analysis of peer and pupil–teacher interaction. Events were sampled from two early years settings in England, one a Reception classroom (4‐ to 5‐year olds) and the other a Year 2 classroom (6‐ to 7‐year olds). This article arises out of the second stage of an ongoing research programme (2004–2007) involving the children and practitioners in these settings. This phase considers the dimensions of question‐posing and the categories of question‐responding and their interrelationship within PT. Three dimensions of questioning were identified as characteristic of PT. These included: (i) question framing, reflecting the purpose inherent within questions for adults and children (including leading, service and follow‐through questions); (ii) question degree: manifestation of the degree of possibility inherent in childrens questions (including possibility narrow, possibility moderate, possibility broad); (iii) question modality, manifestation of the modality inherent in childrens questions (including verbal and non‐verbal forms). The fine‐grained data analysis offers insight into how children engage in PT to meet specific needs in responding to creative tasks and activities and reveals the crucial role that question‐posing and question‐responding play in creative learning. It also provides more detail about the nature of young childrens thinking, made visible through question‐posing and responding in engaging playful contexts.

Reflecting on the creativity agenda in education

Among the initiatives, scholarly conversations, and recent events which demonstrate the ongoing salience of the creativity agenda in education has been a series of six seminars. The seminar series, an initiative of the British Educational Research Association Special Interest Group (BERA SIG), Creativity in Education was held between September 2003 and December 2005. In April 2005, I co-organized and chaired the seminar entitled ‘Creativity: using it wisely?’ This involved keynote speakers: Howard Gardner, Harvard University, Guy Claxton, University of Bristol and Anna Craft, The Open University. This seminar, hosted by the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, attracted 180 delegates including researchers, practitioners and policy-makers with the purpose of sharing situated perspectives on (and some rethinking of) creativity in education. This event was coupled with a twoday residential International Symposium on Creative Learning. The contributors to this special issue were linked to both the seminar and symposium from which papers were submitted by the keynote speakers, presenters and discussants and then refereed according to standard Cambridge Journal of Education procedures. The timeliness of this special issue is embedded in an unprecedented resurgence of activity in the field of creativity in education as an area of scholarship, as a key element of the shifting education policy context, and official agenda in relation to efforts to improve our schools. The creativity agenda is recognized in many countries—not as a transient fad, but as having an explicit role in the economy. It therefore constitutes a fundamentally political imperative. Yet the informing contexts and desired outcomes that characterize creativity as a valued human capacity remain elusive. Consequently, its individual, institutional and cultural value and purpose remain vigorously debated issues (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; JohnSteiner, 2000; Runco, 2002; Sternberg, 2003; Craft, 2005). There is great public deliberation and publicity around the creativity agenda, especially but not only in the UK. In England a great deal of energy (and funding) is devoted to conceptualizing and developing both learning and pedagogy. The agenda is situated and played out in a variety of development work in schools and elsewhere, supported through a range of organizations including Creative Partnerships (Creative Partnerships & DEMOS, 2003; Creative Partnerships, 2004a, b), National College Cambridge Journal of Education Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 313–318