Interpellation Through Interpolation: Informal Learning and Non-Formal Teaching as Catalysts for Shifts in Ideological Positionings

Abstract

Primary music education teaching and learning practices are significantly influenced by the ideological positionality of teachers, including what it means to be ‘musical’ and what is valued within the music lesson. Uniquely framed through the concept of Althusser’s interpellation, this paper traces the shifts in ideological perspectives of Irish primary generalist teachers regarding their understandings of musicality, and in particular, the notion of musicality as ‘giftedness’. Using Participatory Case Study Research, this study derives data from generalist primary teachers (n = 3) and students (n = 137) in the Republic of Ireland across a range of different schools who utilised Musical Futures approaches over the course of a school term. The findings illustrate how engagement in such informal and non-formal teaching and learning pedagogies vis-à-vis Musical Futures approaches acted as a catalyst for the reappraisal of embedded musical beliefs within the primary music classroom, thereby positioning such approaches as a means to address hegemonic structures within primary music education. As teachers confront these ideological assumptions, the paper’s findings shed light on how these shifts have implications for practice within generalist education in the music classroom.

Keywords

interpellation informal learning non-formal teaching primary music education Irish generalist teachers case study research

Introduction

The influence of ideology on understandings of music education pervades a teacher’s practice throughout their career. While formative musical experiences and initial teacher education are pivotal in shaping the educational values of teachers concerning music (Kenny et al., 2015), these values can often remain latent until educators begin teaching in classrooms (Vartuli, 2005). For the generalist primary teacher, the educational setting provides a crucible within which teacher values operate, thereby influencing how these values are expressed and realised. When teachers transition into real-world teaching environments, some values may be questioned, while others may be strengthened or expanded. Moreover, educators may encounter new values or perspectives that were previously unexplored. For example, teachers may develop self-perceptions of being ‘musical’ or ‘unmusical’ (Mills, 2005) – identities that tend to persist or remain static unless challenged by significant experiences or individuals, or until teachers critically reevaluate their value systems.

There is a wealth of international scholarly outputs regarding the impact of Musical Futures approaches on music education policies and teacher practice (D’Amore & Smith, 2017; S. E. Evans et al., 2015; Gubbins 2023, 2024; Hallam et al., 2009, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Isbell, 2018; Jeanneret, 2010; Jeanneret et al., 2011; Mariguddi, 2019, 2021; Moore, 2019; O’Neill & Bespflug, 2011; Papazachariou-Christoforou, 2023; Wang & McPhail, 2024; Wilson, 2019; Wright, 2011; Wright et al., 2012). While these studies often unpack the effects on students’ music learning through informal/non-formal approaches, as yet no study into Musical Futures critically analyses the ideological impact for teachers within the primary generalist context.

Ergo, within the context of Irish primary generalist practice, this paper explores:

RQ1: To what extent are teacher beliefs and practice (teaching and learning) influenced by ideologies of musical value and musical ability?

RQ2: How, if at all, can Musical Futures approaches bring about shifts in ideological positionings regarding teacher beliefs and practice?

Using the theoretical concept of interpellation (Althusser, 2014; Backer, 2018), I consider the potential for shifts in ideological positions regarding musicality as ‘giftedness’ (McPherson, 1997). Such a lens has not been applied to the sphere of music education and the reproduction of ideological positions regarding musical value and musicality, and therefore this paper offers a unique theoretical contribution to contemporary discourse.

Literature Review

Informal Learning and Non-Formal Teaching

Folkestad (2006, p. 135) suggests that formal and informal learning should be conceptualised as part of a continuum to account for and encourage fluidity and movement within these practices:

Formal-informal should not be regarded as a dichotomy, but rather as the two poles of a continuum; in most learning situations, both these aspects of learning are in various degrees present and interacting.

The visualisation of formal, non-formal, and informal learning practices as a spectrum or continuum is helpful in this instance as it highlights the fluidity of musical experiences that shape musical progression and development. These practices should not be regarded then as mutually exclusive within the music lesson and should instead reflect the way real-life musicians engage in their own music learning (Green, 2002) along a continuum of practice.

That said, arising from the need to describe the incorporation of informal learning in formal contexts, the term non-formal teaching has emerged (D’Amore, 2014) to reflect this nuanced pedagogical approach. While Folkestad’s clarification above explains why the terms informal learning and non-formal teaching cannot be used interchangeably and are distinct from one another, Wright et al. (2016, p. 12) describe these two terms as partners due to their many overlapping characteristics, including:

. . . the emphasis on inclusion, removing the necessity of formal barriers such as notation, supporting group-based work, tacit learning, democracy, students as peer teachers, the teacher becoming a facilitator rather than expert and the affordances of these teaching qualities for student skill development in creativity and emotional literacy.

In this way, one could argue that the resultant hybrid learning situation arising from non-formal teaching could be regarded as non-formal learning. Musical Futures approaches can span this continuum, predominantly on the more non-formal and informal range depending on the context in which they occur. Musical Futures is an approach or philosophy of music education that places the needs, interests, and abilities, of students at the heart of the learning experience, and orients intentionality towards playing and making music, with the teacher acting as a facilitator of the process of students’ musical discovery (Green, 2002, 2008). Green’s work into Musical Futures approaches, which has been adapted into a range of contexts and countries, including primary music education (Jeanneret, 2010, Jeanneret et al., 2011; Gubbins, 2023), have yielded positive impact on student music making and engagement, as well as teacher practice. Of course, the literature indicates that the nature of informal and non-formal learning practices is highly personalised to individual contexts (Chua & Ho, 2013; Hallam et al., 2009; Jeanneret, 2010; Jeanneret et al., 2011; O’Neill & Bespflug, 2011; Wright, 2011; Wright et al., 2012).

Wright and Kanellopoulos’ (2010, p. 74) assert that such approaches will pose significant challenges to teachers and teacher education, demanding different qualities than current, more formalised teaching as per the continuum, thereby necessitating the development of new skillsets. However, Hess (2020, p.12) proposes a balance between formal and informal practices to ensure ‘that students who depend solely on school music for their music education will be able to continue in music if they so choose’.

Althusser and Interpellation

Having already established that ideology is highly influential in shaping the teaching and learning dynamic, it follows that change must occur within the ideological positionality of teachers if it is to become manifest in their practice. Exactly how change in an individual’s ideological position occurs is the subject of Althusser’s (2014) volume On the Reproduction of Capitalism (published in English in 2014). He defines ideology as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (p. 181); it is a way of explaining the world by simplifying it, as it is not possible to see and understand the world without operating from an ideological position.

While these imagined relations (i.e. ideologies) are useful to understand and relay how social apparatuses operate, they are in fact just that – imagined – and thus, simplify reality which is always more complex than ideology alludes. Consequently, ‘what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of real relations governing individuals’ existence, but those individuals’ imaginary relation to the real relations in which they live’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 183). He continues his thesis that ideology has a material existence, similar to Green’s (1988) interpellation concept of reification (p. 2). It is in this material existence that individuals can be subjects of ideology. To explain this concept, he coins the term to describe how an individual becomes a subject of an ideology:

ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way as to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals (it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) through the very precise operation that we call interpellation.

(Althusser, 2014, p. 190)

Like Bourdieu’s (1977) ‘hysteresis’ effect of being ‘out of touch’ with a time and place (Hardy, 2014), interpellation occurs when an individual’s beliefs and values do not align with that of their environment, causing a feeling of not ‘being with the programme’, necessitating a change in beliefs in order to align with their environment. It is the moment at which an individual becomes a subject of an ideology. In his recent work that tracks the resurgence of Althusser’s work for modern educators, Backer (2019, p. 3) describes interpellation as ‘a moment of forced integration into [a] program’, that can be ‘a gut-wrenching, difficult, unpleasant moment’ (Backer, 2019, p. 8). Elsewhere, he says that its impact is ‘like a slow drip that eventually forms a stalagmite’ (Backer, 2019, p. 4).

Mindful of critics to the limitations of Althusserian ideology, Jean-Jacques Lecerle in A Marxist Philosophy of Language (published in French in 1991 and translated to English in 2006) extended Althusser’s concept of interpellation to recognise that an individual has some autonomy over ideological structures. Indeed, as Backer (2018) attests: ‘The fixed subject position can be unfixed; in fact, it is always in a constant state of struggle over its composition in the balance of forces’ (p. 9). He outlines the term counterinterpellation [sic] to describe the moment when an individual realises that they are not ‘with the programme’ of the dominant ideology but that they actively go against this ideologic position, to ‘constitute, deconstitute, and reconstitute our relations of production’ (Backer, 2018, p. 10).

While it is generally through interpellation that ideologies are reproduced in society, it is within counterinterpellation that an individual’s capacity for change in resistance to hegemonic ideology is achieved. In other words, a counterinterpellation can be thought of as a change or shift in an individual’s ideological position against the dominating or prevailing ideology of that space. As such, any teaching action that produces a counterinterpellation could be argued to be a critical pedagogy.

Musicality as ‘Giftedness’

Glover and Ward (1993) and Henriksson-Macaulay and Welch (2015) argue that musicality is intrinsic to all individuals from birth, countering the prevalent teacher belief in innate musical talent (Henley, 2017; Jaap & Patrick, 2015). Indeed, counter-arguments to this ‘talent myth’ have existed for some time within modern music education, despite the ideological prevalence of the concept of innate talent (Burgoyne et al., 2022; Jackendoff & Lerdahl, 2006; McPherson et al., 2022; Peretz, 2006; Suzuki, 1983).

Despite rare instances of inspirational cases like Vicki in Russell’s (1996) article, in this study, the ideological notion of musical ‘giftedness’ was challenged (McPherson, 1997). Literature consistently explores how teachers perceive musical ability, with findings indicating a tendency to view it as fixed rather than adaptable (for example, see Hennessy, 2000). Biasutti (2010) cautions against such views, warning of potential low expectations for non-gifted students. Rodriguez (2009) highlights the challenges teachers face in delivering music education due to narrow conceptualisations of musicality, which often revolve around singing ability (Heyning, 2011). Musicality, as described by Rodriguez (2009), encompasses both explicit and implicit skills, contrasting with traditional music instruction goals (Green, 1988).

Method

Methodological Approach

Participatory Case Study was chosen for this study, which aims to comprehend the complexity of human life (Williams & Keady, 2021), address power inequalities (Mabry, 2008), and engage in an interpretive process within the case's broader context (Stake, 1995, 2005). This approach emphasises social action and change, fostering dialogue between local participants dissatisfied with the status quo and the researcher (Maguire, 1987; Reilly, 2009). Additionally, the methodology is unique in that it is rooted in the specific context and is influenced by environmental and research-based objectives (Yin, 2009).

Context of the Study

Mindful of the context-specific nature of informal and non-formal learning practices, it is important to explain how such approaches were realised in this study. Following from their engagement in a Musical Futures workshop, facilitated by the researcher, seven generalist teachers participated across six primary schools, each expressing a willingness to bring about change in their practices. The workshop invited Professor Gwen Moore to share her insights into a previous pilot of Musical Futures approaches within primary and post-primary education in the Republic of Ireland (Moore, 2019). This workshop was widely advertised on social media, teacher organisations, and by word of mouth. Thirty teachers attended the workshop which included an understanding of the approach, its underpinning principles, a demonstration of some of the suggested resources, and a discussion around the approach.

Ethical approval was obtained from the Mary Immaculate College Research Ethics Committee (approval number A20-033), and participants provided informed consent. The recruitment process involved a pilot cycle, a Musical Futures workshop, and subsequent expressions of interest from six teachers in the Munster region. In their pre-interviews, all participating teachers felt their practice in music education had become somewhat static and wished to find something new that they could try with their students, with the workshop piquing their interest in trying Musical Futures approaches within their classrooms. The participants represented diverse demographics, contributing rich and varied data for analysis. The study focussed primarily on the Making Music and Everyone Can Play strands of the Musical Futures online resources.¹ These resources form an online library, with a specific focus on supporting teachers to deliver music to students at the primary level in a flexible and customisable manner, with several different strands that include playing instruments, developing rhythm and pulse, facilitating, composing skills, song singing, and others. The teachers, in working with the researcher, decided what strand of the resources they thought would work most effectively for their specific class context, grounded in the needs and interests of their students.

Participants

This paper will focus on three of the participating teachers and their students, pseudonymously identified as Sally, Winifred, and David. Given the highly personal and idiosyncratic nature of informal learning practices, and in keeping with the principles of Musical Futures and informal learning (Green, 2008), participating teachers and students adapted the approaches in the most meaningful way for their contexts:

Sally utilised the Everyone Can Play set of resources as her 13 third-sixth class students (9- to 12-year-olds) learned to play the ukulele over 10 weeks. This school was a small, rural, mixed sex school. In collaboration with their teachers, the students chose certain songs to learn and copy, including ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and ‘Shotgun’, among others.

David engaged his 16 second class pupils (8-year-olds) while drawing on the Everyone Can Play resources to learn to play the guitar over a period of 12 weeks. This school was an urban boys’ senior school (first to sixth class), with DEIS Band II status. The students learned to play and sing along to several songs including ‘Songbird’ by Oasis, culminating in a performance for other classes in the school.

With her 29 fifth class students (11-year-olds), Winifred utilised the Everyone Can Play set of supports to learn the ukulele, with an overall aim of composing their own songs by the end of the 20 weeks of participation. This was an all-girls school in an urban setting.

This diverse group represented various age groups, genders, teaching experiences, qualifications, and musical backgrounds, offering a comprehensive dataset for analysis within the context of generalist primary music education in Ireland.

Data Gathering and Analysis

Various data collection tools were employed, including pre-engagement interviews, semi-structured interviews, researcher journal, lesson observations (recorded in researcher journal), teacher reflective notes, post-engagement interviews, and focus group discussions with students. These methods aimed to provide rich, contextualised data for the participatory case study research process.

As the study was investigatory and exploratory in nature, abductive analysis was applied as it enabled the selection of interpellation as a hypothetical lens through which the data can be explained (Kennedy & Thornberg, 2018). The analysis involved manually examining pilot data, transcribing interviews and focus groups, reviewing video recordings, and coding using NVivo. Themes, categories, and codes were synthesised from the data, aligning with Creswell’s (2021, pp. 273–274) suggested coding approach, focussing on tracing shifts in ideological orientation experienced by participants, guided by the theoretical lens of interpellation. Centred on this methodology, several themes were generated in the context of the study and this paper will specifically trace the shifts in ideological orientation experienced by the participants, using interpellation as the theoretical guiding lens.

Findings

In this study, teachers’ beliefs about musical ability before engagement with Musical Futures approaches generally resonated with such fixed mindsets of musicality as a ‘gift’ or ‘talent’ as found in the literature. Through an engagement with non-formal teaching, interpellations occurred for teachers regarding who they deemed as musical and what it means to be musical. For Sally, her expectations for one sixth class boy, Sam, taking part in this project seemed predetermined from her pre-engagement interview:

Sally: Music I think is something you know – I have a load of sixth class boys. You know, song singing and things like that don’t go down well sometimes. It’s trying to get things to interest them and trying to pick the right song or pick the thing that kind of motivates them to do it is sometimes challenging.

It emerged that this position was apparently challenged from conversations with the teacher intra-engagement, as can be seen in the following excerpt from my researcher journal:

One girl in particular seemed to really enjoy the lesson (Roisín) and I could see her smiling and looking at me regularly throughout the lesson. She seemed really engaged and hitting the rhythms and changes accurately. As one of the youngest in the class (3rd class), this was very reassuring to witness. Chatting informally with the teacher after the lesson, she said that this child was from a very musical family and that she was a ‘good’ student. She said that she ‘wasn’t surprised’ that this girl would take to the ukulele as well as she did. She compared her to one of the 6th class boys who is similarly doing well picking up the ukulele but who ‘isn’t academically inclined’ so it came as a surprise to her to see him doing so well.

The difference between the expectations for Roisín and Sam in this extract demonstrates the assumed connection made here by Sally between academic ability and musical ability. Also, the idea that musical talent is inherited influenced Sally’s expectation for Roisín within the music lesson. By contrast, as one of the boys, it was perceived that Sam wouldn’t benefit from this experience, perhaps because of an assumption of boys not liking music and not being as academically strong as girls. However, it is clear that Sally went through an ideological interpellation from the transcript of her post-engagement interview:

Sally: Well there was one or two children that would struggle with concentration. You know, and I was surprised that one of them turned out to be our top ukulele player. He’d no problem concentrating on the music like, it was something that interested him, you know, and he really, really excelled at it. Once he put his mind to it, he really, really just got it. Like I knew he was kind of musical. But he never really had the opportunity to do something to that extreme and also he struggles in other areas of the curriculum such as reading. But it didn’t impact this, you know. It was an area he achieved success in and he was delighted with himself. And he knew who he was good at it, that kind of a way.

Researcher: And what was it about the approach that sparked that interest, could you figure it out?

Sally: He liked the instrument anyway, you know. They’re kind of a popular instrument, the ukulele. But definitely the approach - it’s the visual again, you know. He would be kind of a visual auditory learner, you know, and it was the interaction with that. He would struggle to read written things and books would turn him off. So like the fact that this was just moving all the time and was telling you what’s coming next, you know, he’d a lot to concentrate on. And it wasn’t boring him. It was kind of interactive, and he enjoyed it.

It would appear that Sam had been ‘written off’ in terms of his musical potential due to the intersectionality of his academic difficulties and his gender and, for the teacher, her expectations about his musical ability were assumed to be in this category also (Green, 1988). For her, the shock of him turning out to be the class’s ‘top ukulele player’ is a moment of interpellation here. She believed (and was subject to the ideology) that certain people can be musical, and others cannot and her assumptions that guided this assertion were based on gender and academic ability. Bourdieu (1977; Bourdieu & Nice, 1977) would argue that students are positioned within the field of the classroom according to several interrelated factors. However, their positions can remain relatively fixed in this field. Music education creates in essence an entirely different field with the positions of the students completely readjusted and subject to repositioning and recategorisation. Sally above was still working from the academic field in guiding her habitus and interactions with the class. When the positions of the students within the musical field did not match her preconceived notions, this threw up conflicts and surprises for her. One would argue that her beliefs about musicality have been challenged and that her assumptions about who can be musical have changed. These ascriptions of musicality will, in turn, be mirrored in the students’ musical self-concept.

Notions of this ‘talent myth’ (Shouldice, 2020) were prevalent in Winifred’s beliefs about musicality too. She was surprised at how well one student responded to informal learning pedagogies.

Winifred: Yeah, I think some of the kids as well in the class who wouldn’t have been very musical and would have been maybe quiet in school or had learning difficulties or anything, it was kind of a chance for them to shine. Like there was one or two girls in the class - now one in particular, she plays the guitar at home - but she would be very nervous to like participate in anything in the class, especially if it’s her on her own out loud, like speaking out loud, or answering questions out loud. But because she had the guitar knowledge, she was able to transfer her skills to the ukulele and became quite good at it. So children were asking her for help, you know, and she felt so confident then and she was coming up to show me things - you know, I’d say oh, I don’t know how to do this, and she was showing me - so I think for those kind of children, you know, they got to experience success in ways that I wouldn’t have realised what’s gonna happen, you know, in the programme, so that was good.

Similar to Sam’s case in Sally’s class, this student’s musicality had been presumed lacking due to her shy personality. Clearly, Winifred’s beliefs about this student’s musical ability, and indeed that of her class, were challenged. Having a strong musical background herself, Winifred had initially assumed that teachers who were not ‘musical’ would struggle with teaching music:

Winifred: I also think that like a lot of teachers - now I could be wrong in saying this - but I think a lot of teachers think like, if they don’t have enough knowledge in the subject or if they don’t like the subject, that’s kind of it. They just think, oh it’s too hard to teach it. I know I have that attitude with certain subjects. I wouldn’t really want to teach them if I feel I don’t have as much knowledge in that area as others but I think people who don’t play an instrument or aren’t musical think that you have to be musical to teach music. But like, there’s so much you can do without knowing how to read music at all, you know? They just need to be shown how to do that, you know. I think I’ve seen that in the teachers coming in doing teaching practice. They kind of freak out, oh God I don’t know how to teach music. With the music inspector, they don’t know how they’re going to get through it. But then when you break it down and teach them a lesson that has nothing to do with singing, or nothing to do with playing an instrument - it might be clapping games, or a rhythmic exercise or something they realise oh music can actually be very fun, and easy to do, if they’re shown what to do. So yeah, I definitely think it’s professional development for teachers is very important actually. I kind of didn’t realise until recently.

The emphasis Winifred places on knowledge as an absolute prerequisite to teaching music may stem from her extensive music background within the classical genre. From using Musical Futures approaches, Winifred’s viewpoint had changed (‘there’s so much you can do without knowing how to read music’). As a potential method of overcoming a lack of confidence and/or knowledge in teaching music, she also signals the importance of explicit modelling of pedagogies and strategies. It would appear that she realises that ‘giftedness’ is not necessary to be able to teach music. This was noted during lesson observations, where every student was engaging with the ukulele playing and were eager to demonstrate what chords they knew and could play.

Moreover, David’s ideological position on musicality underwent a similar interpellation:

David: . . . in my experience, the children with behavioural issues, really enjoyed it as well as the average learner or the high-achievers too. Like the high-achievers who are good at most of the subjects that I do in school with them, were well able for the tricky chords at the very end. And as I said, one fellow was able to do very good chord changes from chord to chord, so it benefitted him. The average players were able to maintain those chords and strum on the beat, which was really important. And then you have the weaker fellas who were still able to take part - maybe didn’t get the strumming absolutely correct, but they were able to hold down the chord. So I do think it had equal benefit to all of them, even if they weren’t all, you know, playing as well as each other.

Not unlike Sally, David’s equation of musical ability with academic talent was challenged. Those who academically might have been classed as ‘weaker fellas’ demonstrated an aptitude for learning the guitar that came as a surprise to him. Before participation in the project, these students may never have been given the opportunity to learn an instrument. However, David clearly expresses the benefits from engaging in non-formal approaches for these students, as well as his whole class.

From the students, ideologies of musicality as giftedness were manifest in comments about music being hard and something you must be good at already before you do it in school. For many of them in the focus groups, they remarked at how much easier it was than they had imagined:

Jane (sixth class student): I liked how easy it was to pick up. Like a lot of people in the class don’t have musical experience. And it was very easy to pick up. Like, if you missed a day of school, and we were doing it and you came in the next day you’d know exactly know what to do.

Iasac (David’s second class student): [Musical Futures is] about learning easy music without doing it the difficult way.

Sasha (third class student): I would say that when you’re doing it you’re basically going to be making music. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at musical instruments because it’s not that hard. It’s really easy. Like it doesn’t matter if you’re not good at guitar because you can easily play with your body.

The fact that such comments were prevalent among the students too suggests that the idea of music as giftedness has been embedded in the children’s perception of music. This was noted, particularly during lesson observations, where students were observed playing with the play-alongs at whatever level they were comfortable. Musical Futures encouraged both teachers and students to revisit these assumptions of musical ability, triggering interpellations surrounding this ideological position.

Discussion

From these interpellations, it emerges that ideological positions regarding music impact and are impacted by teacher beliefs and values in their respective contexts. Indeed, their capacity for shifts in such ideological orientations was manifested through an engagement with informal and non-formal pedagogies. Further discussion follows on this phenomenon.

Musicality as Giftedness: The Talent Myth

The data suggest there is a prevailing assumption among teachers that not everyone is inherently musical, contrasting this with scholars who argue for the innate musical abilities of all individuals. In fact, the data further highlights instances of teachers initially associating musical ability with certain gender and academic expectations, only to experience a shift in their beliefs through informal learning approaches. Indeed, the talent myth has been widely researched in the field of music (Biasutti, 2010; Brändström, 1999; Clelland, 2006; R. J. Evans et al., 2000; Hallam & Prince, 2003; Hallam & Shaw, 2002; Howe et al., 1998; Jaap & Patrick, 2015; Legette, 2012; Shouldice, 2019; Sloboda, 1996). Although in the case of Turino’s (2008) participatory music making framing, there is an acknowledgement that exceptional musical ability can exist, generally within the field of ethnomusicology the notion of musical giftedness is not present (Hill, 2011). By this, it is meant that musical ability is not subject to a select group of individuals, but that it is an innate ability to everyone.

Teachers who identify as ‘musical’ or ‘unmusical’ will have corresponding beliefs about music and their ability to teach music, which will, in turn, shape the beliefs of the students that they teach (Mills, 1989; Shouldice, 2014a, 2014b, 2019, 2020). Shouldice (2014a) conducted an interesting study in the United States that showed that students’ perceptions of their musical ability deteriorate as they progress through school. Musical ability in this study was open to interpretation from the perspective of the students themselves but was generally defined in relation to comparison with their peers and as someone who plays an instrument or sings (Shouldice, 2014a, p.340). Indeed, conceptions of musicality are confounded by varying interpretations of the term that can be broadly defined as: being musically active, having musical experiences, doing music, feeling musical, making musical contributions, and developing musical expertise (Henley, 2017, p. 475).

The implication of this ideological position is important as it shows that many teachers do not believe that all their students are capable of being successful in music. From this assumption of ability, it is logical to predict that teacher expectations will be that only the few who demonstrate a degree of success in music are talented. The danger of this assumption is that teachers who deem a student as generally successful in school are often the same students who are assumed to be successful in music and are thus given priority in obtaining leading roles within the musical activity. In other words, musicality is presupposed to be analogous to academic aptitude, thereby proliferating exclusionary music practices. We know that the labels of ‘musical’ and ‘unmusical’ given to students are highly damaging to the musical identities of students, particularly if they sense that the teacher does not think they are ‘gifted’ at music (Lamont, 2009).

How then, can an interpellation in this ideology benefit music teaching and learning? From the findings presented, the shift in ideological position encourages teachers to assume that all students have ability in music, giving more students a chance to experience success in the music lesson. The intersectionality between academic ability, gender, and musical ability seemed to emerge in some cases, particularly in Sally’s practice. Through broadening her interpretation of music education, Sally underwent an interpellation, realising that musicality is not predetermined by gender or general academic ability. This will hopefully have powerful repercussions on how she will approach music lessons in the future and how she will view the musicality of her students. Similar interpellations occurred for Winifred and David, challenging the assumption of musicality as a gift or talent.

Conclusion

Returning to the title of this paper, the word interpolation has several meanings in different fields. We know that in popular music, interpolation generally refers to taking part of an existing musical work and incorporating it into a new work, which several participating teachers and students brought about in their respective settings. In mathematics, interpolation can refer to the insertion of an intermediate value or term into a series by estimating or calculating it from surrounding known values (Merriam-Webster²). In language, an interpolation relates to a remark interjected in a conversation (Merriam-Webster). Each of these definitions speak to an aspect of the process through which ideological shifts were realised in the course of this project and paper. The process of interpellation made clear or filled in the gaps between assumptions of musical value and manifestations in practice. They also provided an opportunity for reappraisal of practice – an interjection in the routine discourse of teaching and learning in the music classroom. Indeed, this paper has examined shifts ideological positions using Althusser’s interpellation as a tool to understand the process. Informal learning using the Musical Futures approach has challenged the notion of musicality as ‘giftedness’.

We know that teacher habitus both mediates and is mediated by practice (Bourdieu, 1983; Dwyer, 2015; Author 2023b; Moore, 2012; Reed-Danahay, 2005; Thomson, 2012; Wright, 2008; Yang, 2014). Thus, the extent to which teacher practice has the capacity to change is contingent on the teacher’s current musical background and experiences. As such, their propensity for interpellation and/or counter-interpellation is subject to their accrued habitus and capital (including educational capital and musical content knowledge). This was clear in the cases of Sally, David, and Winifred, whose strong existing musical backgrounds worked to place them in a favourable position for ideological interpellation as they embodied the approach, using it to enhance their existing corpora of pedagogies and practice as music educators. For these teachers, the ‘obstacle’ of trying to understand the musical components of the approach was not present to any significant degree, thus freeing them to reflect on their own practice in greater awareness, often encouraging them to look at the bigger ideological picture and critically examine their ideological positionings.

That being so, I would argue that there is a link between teachers’ habitus and their inclination towards counter-interpellation. By this, I mean that teachers who regard themselves as knowledgeable music educators with high self-efficacy are more likely to question existing pedagogies, ideologies, methodologies, and practices as they feel that they are in a position from which to critically interrogate and examine them. The converse it could be argued is also true, that is to say, that teachers who do not feel confident in their abilities to teach music rely on pre-existing structures and conform to dominant ideologies and practices (i.e. they are interpellated). In essence, this comes back to the maxims of ‘teaching what you know’ or ‘teaching how you were taught’. This argument is logical as we are comfortable with the familiar and if most people are conforming to an ideological position there is safety in this position and therefore, we assume must be doing the right thing. However, it is in questioning the entrenched ideologies that exist currently and confronting them as this paper has done that new and innovative paradigms are created, and new fora for dialogue and meaningful educational change in music education are negotiated.

In summary, this paper has discussed the impact of ideological positions on music education, focussing on the perception of musicality as ‘giftedness’. Certainly, it can be argued that teachers' beliefs about musical ability influence their teaching practices and consequently, student outcomes. Notions of the ‘talent myth’ have been explored, with an emphasis on the need to view musical ability as inherent in everyone rather than restricted to a select few. Within the context of this study, Musical Futures approaches have emerged as a transformative and critical pedagogy for music education, challenging traditional ideologies to create a more inclusive, democratic, and participatory learning environment.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Edmond Gubbins

Author Contribution

Edmond Gubbins: Conceptualisation; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Writing – original draft; and Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Irish Research Council under Grant Number GOIPG/2020/374. The author would also like to acknowledge that this research has also received funding from the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation and Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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