Educational Change and the Secondary School Music Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand

Graham McPhail, Vicki Thorpe, Stuart Wise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351613569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Educational Change and the Secondary School Music Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand provides a fascinating case study in educational change. The music curriculum has been greatly affected by deep cultural and economic forces such as the growth of popular music's importance in young people's lives, by demands for inclusive and multicultural education, and not least by advances in technology that promise to invigorate all aspects of teaching and learning. This book brings together the work of a number of leading music education scholars and teachers from Aotearoa/New Zealand to both explore these issues and to share case studies of practice: both the positive changes and the unintended consequences. Each chapter focuses on a current issue in music education and the final chapter contains responses from a number of practitioners to the issues raised by the authors, drawing together the practical and theoretical dimensions of the book.

Section 1
Educational change and the music curriculum

1
Mapping the field

Graham McPhail, Vicki Thorpe, and Stuart Wise

Introduction

In the past few decades, music in the secondary school in Western countries has been subject to a degree of change experienced by few other school subjects. In particular, music curricula have been greatly affected by the growth of popular music’s importance in young people’s lives, demands for inclusive and multicultural approaches to education, and advances in technology that promise to invigorate all aspects of teaching and learning. Within music education, these key issues reflect wider socio-political changes related to the need for education generally to be more relevant, inclusive, experience-based, student-centred, culturally responsive, and technologically enhanced. Internationally, music education is continually called to account for its lack of relevance and effectiveness. This book addresses this call from the perspective of secondary music education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In it we ask: How are New Zealand music education researchers and secondary school teachers responding to these challenges? What do music teachers and students think we should be teaching? How should we be going about it, and where does the authority for curricular inclusion lie?

We suggest that the experiences and insights of New Zealand educators will be of interest to music educators and academics in other countries. One key reason for this is that educational reform in New Zealand has been pervasive since the 1980s. It was one of the first nations in the Western world to implement neoliberal economic policies in far-reaching ways (Codd & Openshaw 2005; Shore 2010). New Zealand’s small size (population 4.5 million) and idiosyncratic educational environment has enabled nimble and frequent responses to ongoing shifts in international educational policy. For example, in the last 20 years, the school music curriculum has changed twice and the entire secondary school qualification system has been completely restructured. As the authors will show, this is both a strength and a weakness.

Shore (2010) suggests that it is by considering effects at the micro and local levels that we begin to see ‘the contours and more diffuse “macro” process of globalisation and capitalist modernity’ (p. 2). Rata (2012, p. 12) explains this connection of global forces with local changes through the concept of localisation; ‘the process by which social organisation changes at the local level in response to global forces’. She argues that the most important changes in the last four decades are ‘the de-politicisation of the working class; the decline of universalism; the rise of pre-modern groups based on race, religion, and tradition; and the increasing power of global elites’ (p. 12). In terms of global influences on education through organisations such as the OECD, UNESCO, and the World Bank, in New Zealand we see complex, and sometimes contradictory, discourses in the new arena of ‘global governance’ of education. For example ‘the imagined “teacher facilitator” at the heart of the OECD’s conception of a good teacher’ (Robertson 2012, p. 587) appears to stand in tension with the teacher who will be appraised and held accountable for outcomes in the demand to produce knowledgeable, lifelong learners and workers for the global, knowledge economy. More recently, particularly in the UK, there has been a neoconservative return to highly specified curriculum content, in strong contrast to New Zealand’s ‘high-trust’ curriculum, where school teachers are allowed broad discretion in their content choices (McPhail 2013).

Much of the change documented in this book was initiated by music teachers. A key example is when, in the 1990s, considerable ‘grass-roots’ political pressure was brought to bear upon the Ministry of Education and New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) to make secondary school music more ‘accessible’ and ‘relevant’. This was, in part, influenced by new music assessment procedures in the UK when, in the late 1980s, the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) was introduced. Stuart Wise was teaching in the UK at that time and was quick to take up any opportunity to attend any related professional development courses. On his return to NZ in 1989, inspired by what he had seen in the UK, Stuart collaborated with a number of other local music educators (Merryn Dunmill, then lecturer in music education at the Christchurch College of Education, and teachers Sue McLachlan, Tony Ryan, and Pete Rainey) to develop a local music course, CantaMusic. This certificate, a local, informal ‘qualification’, replaced the national (three-hour, written) external examination, School Certificate Music. Key to CantaMusic’s success was the inclusion of individual performance and composition, with an emphasis on a more relevant and accessible range of musics in classical and popular styles. CantaMusic and another course developed by schools’ advisors Dorothy Buchanan and Jeremy Winter were so popular and successful that the Ministry of Education and NZQA were obliged to develop a more relevant and practical assessment for School Certificate (Thorpe 2008). The written examination was soon replaced with a number of assessments, some carried out by the teacher rather than an external examiner, and included performance and composition in contemporary and popular styles. A decade later, this ‘new’ School Certificate Music subsequently informed many of the decisions made for ‘Music’ during the development of the new national qualification, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). Over the past 20 years, as a direct result of these changes, the number of students studying music in senior secondary school has increased steadily (McPhail 2012). The increase in music’s popularity as an elective school subject in New Zealand seems to stand in contrast to trends in the UK, where music remains relatively unpopular (Maton 2014), and perhaps in the USA, where the dominance of ensemble-based education programmes are critiqued for their lack of relevance, particularly in relation to democratic educational aims (Allsup 2016).

New Zealand schools are to a large degree self-managing, and major curriculum and assessment changes have created an environment where teachers and students have a great deal of autonomy in making curriculum choices. On the other hand, neoliberalism has brought with it increased measures of accountability and competitiveness at various levels of the education system. Alongside this is a long history of progressivism in New Zealand education generating diverse teacher responses to government market-derived rhetoric and policy (Mutch 2013). At ‘ground level’ teachers strive to keep long-held, student-centred educational ideas in balance with new managerial demands. Many of these teacher responses are outlined in the chapters of the book.

For the discussions in the chapters to be more readily understood we include here a brief overview of New Zealand’s secondary school music system.

An overview of the New Zealand context

Prior to the 1990s, the national curriculum privileged academic knowledge over procedural knowledge and reflected colonial connections to the British educational system. This academic approach harks back to 1945, when music first entered the canon of academic subjects (Drummond 2003) with its inclusion in the syllabus for the then-national School Certificate (Thwaites 1998), the third-year qualification that was the final school leaving attainment for most students. The examination was academic (written, declarative knowledge) and entirely classical in its conception and, in essence, it remained so until 1993, when, in response to pressure from teachers, a radically new curriculum and assessment system for music was introduced (see earlier). These 1993 revisions included allowing teachers to undertake summative assessments (referred to as ‘internal assessment’) of instrumental performance and composition and to select music works for study locally. These changes facilitated the inclusion of popular and other music within the curriculum and allowed for a more ‘student-centred’ approach to curriculum conception.

In 2000 a new national curriculum for the arts was published, the last of seven curriculum areas, and in 2002, further and more substantial changes were instigated with the arrival of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), in which ‘packages’ of knowledge and skills known as Achievement Standards offer a wide range of assessment possibilities in support of courses that teachers can devise locally to meet the needs and interests of their students. In 2007 a new New Zealand Curriculum was published, providing the final means for the localisation of curriculum content by combining earlier separate curriculum documents into one volume. Curriculum content guidance was reduced to generic outcomes statements. Over the last 15 years, varied, eclectic, localised, and student-centred ‘open’ classroom music programmes have emerged, focused largely on solo and small group performance, composition, listening, and analysis (McPhail 2012). Teachers, therefore, are challenged by the need to develop knowledge, expertise, and pedagogies across a very wide range of musical forms and practices. This differs markedly from the North American context, for example. In New Zealand bands, orchestras, and choirs are usually extra-curricular activities occurring outside the classroom.

The back-story: political change

As indicated earlier, New Zealand was an early adopter of neoliberalism in the 1980s and early 1990s, applying neoliberal tenets across the whole of government (Shore 2010). Harvey (as cited in Robertson 2012, p. 586) summarises neoliberalism as a political project that suggests ‘human well-being can be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’. The reform agenda in New Zealand had multiple aims: addressing economic growth, reducing government expenditure, and curbing welfare dependency; ‘the model which became known as the “New Zealand Experiment” was hailed by the World Bank, The Economist, and the organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as an example for the rest of the world to follow’ (Shore 2010, p. 3).

Within education, this led to a reconfiguration of educational structures and a reconceptualisation of knowledge and pedagogy. Governance has largely been devolved to individual schools, while the curriculum at a national level has become increasingly generic, with a shift to the development of dispositions or ‘key competencies’ for lifelong learning. The national curriculum is seen as a guide rather than a prescription for schools to follow; in fact, the paramount message from the Ministry of Education appears to be that schools must meet the perceived needs of their local community above all else. At the level of the school we now find that the curriculum content may vary greatly from school to school. In the case of music, the range of possible curriculum experiences, content, and outcomes for students is highly varied as a result of these localising forces, as Graham McPhail’s survey reported in Chapter 9 (this volume) reveals.

In schools, neoliberal effects have been both clearly visible – in school management and self-governance areas – and less visible – in the way outcomes-based assessment and a focus on skills can undermine disciplinary content and coherence in the curriculum (Muller 2006, 2009; O’Neill, Clark & Openshaw 2004). For example, in secondary schools in New Zealand the modularised format of senior school qualifications in the NCEA drives curricular content in a form of ‘credit hunting’ (Hipkins & Vaughan 2012; Rata & Taylor 2015). Courses often lack integration (Locke 2005; Wenden 2015), and teacher and student choices can result in students missing out on foundational knowledge that may be important should they decide to move to tertiary study (Madjar et al. 2009; McPhail under review; Moore 2014; Smaill et al. 2012). The key question often asked by young learners now is ‘What is this worth?’ rather than concerning themselves with the intrinsic value of the knowledge on offer. On the more positive side, the changes appear to have brought about a number of positive outcomes (Hipkins, Johnston & Sheehan 2016). This includes increased variety in curriculum content, flexibility of senior students’ assessment choices, a more open teacher-student environment focused on learning, and the utilisation of technology’s affordances.

The National Certificate of Educational Achievement

The NCEA is a modular, standards-based, criterion-referenced, national qualification where students study a number of courses or subjects. For assessment purposes, individuals are not compared with each other but with the Assessment Criteria of a specific Achievement Standard. In each NCEA subject, skills and knowledge are assessed against a number of Achievement Standards, each with a set of written criteria. Some of these Standards are externally assessed, mainly by written examination, while others are internally assessed by the classroom teacher and subject to external moderation by NZQA. When a student achieves a Standard, he or she gains a number of credits that count towards an NCEA certificate. There are three levels of certificate. In general, students work through Levels 1 to 3 during their last three years of school. High achievement for each Standard is recognised by grades of Merit or Excellence. A student does not ‘pass’ a subject but rather achieves a series of Standards within that subject. However, a high level of Merit or Excellence grades within a subject qualifies a student to receive a ‘subject endorsement’ certificate. All NCEA Achievement Standards are stand-alone, leaving both teachers and students to choose which assessments to complete within subjects.

When designing NCEA music courses, the teacher usually selects a series of Achievement Standards to suit the specific needs of the students in the class. Typically, this is a mix of solo and group performance, composition, music works and score analysis, and aural perception, and more recently, digital, recording, and amplification technologies. In New Zealand secondary schools, students learn to play an instrument or sing either through state-funded music lessons taught by ‘itinerant’ teachers at their school or from private teachers. Classroom teachers do not teach instrumental or vocal performance and typically direct ensembles such as choirs in out-of-class time such as the lunch-break or after school. Unlike in some countries, the involvement of New Zealand teachers in summative assessment for high stakes is not particularly controversial (Crisp 2012), and a music teacher may even design NCEA courses that are entirely internally assessed.

The New Zealand Curriculum and its relationship to the NCEA

NCEA Achievement Standards are broadly deriv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Section 1 Educational change and the music curriculum
• Section 2 Curriculum makers at work: inside the music classroom
• Index