Abstract
The 2020 National Association for Music Education (NAfME) National Conference in Kissimmee, Florida, will be the first since 2008 to bring together PreK–12 music educators and administrators, music teacher educators, and music education researchers. This conference presents an opportunity to reimagine how the unique needs of each constituency may be served alongside the common interests of all NAfME members. Research partnerships that bring music teachers together with expert researchers to address major problems of the profession is one area of common interest overdue for promotion. To get research partnerships off the ground, however, we need a change in tenor and tone.
For too long, music educators and music education researchers have occupied separate spaces within the U.S. music education ecosystem—aware of each other’s existence but unable to recognize natural interdependencies or create mutually beneficial responses to challenges. Researchers point to practitioners as being too naive about systematic methods for improving music education policy and practice, and teachers charge researchers with being too disconnected from the practical realities of classrooms. Rhetoric has divided camps rather than bringing people together for a common cause.
The typical approach used to broker a stronger teacher-researcher alliance has been to require that music educators become more astute in the ways of doing research by completing an introductory research course as part of graduate study in music education. The origins of this approach date back to a 1954 report of the Committee on Graduate Study in Music Education—a group that included professional luminaries such as Allen Britton, E. Thayer Gaston, Wiley Housewright, and Charles Leonard. Members of the Committee recommended that while graduate students in music education continue to study music, pedagogy, and related subjects outside of music as an extension of their undergraduate education, they also must develop their ability to do independent and scholarly research (Music Educators National Conference, 1954).
The purpose of a graduate school, then, is not merely to cram more knowledge into the head of the student; rather its goal should be to give him better understanding and to lead him to think independently and along original lines. . . . [An] emphasis upon creative scholarship and independent research of an original nature is so intimately associated with graduate study as to form the very core of its being. The graduate student is, as a consequence, thrown more largely upon his own resources and is expected to measure up to a more severe standard of achievement. (Music Educators National Conference, 1954, p. 160)
While it may be important and worthwhile to develop some basic research competence through a master’s degree course, this approach alone is unlikely to produce research partnerships that are mutually beneficial, widespread, or long-lasting. Less than 60% of U.S. teachers hold a postbaccalaureate degree (McFarland et al., 2018), so tying research competence to a specific graduate-level course would leave 4 out of 10 educators in a deficit position. Despite the proliferation of graduate programs in music education such that nearly 250 institutions now offer a master’s degree (Austin, 2007), it seems plausible that many institutions no longer require a research course or lack the faculty expertise needed to effectively mentor graduate students engaged in research. Moreover, such courses may not be structured or delivered in a way that builds both an understanding and a valuing of research. Dorfman and Lipscomb (2005), for example, surveyed 145 graduate students enrolled in music education research classes to determine their attitudes toward the study and application of research. A comparison of before- and after-course responses revealed that while research class students felt somewhat more knowledgeable with respect to research techniques, their attitudes toward systematic inquiry, motivation to continue studying research, and beliefs about research influencing how they teach remained unchanged. Dorfman and Lipscomb concluded that respondents viewed research as a peripheral element of their graduate education. This interpretation is congruent with the findings of Conway, Eros, and Stanley (2009), who reported that while some graduate students appreciate being able to connect research with practice, many are content to view graduate education as an opportunity for “re-interaction with the undergraduate curriculum” (p. 137).
In recent years, some educators have advocated for new conceptions of research as situated inquiry or reflective practice. The notion that we can integrate teaching and research by helping teachers to become “scholars in classroom practice” is hardly new. In the early part of the 20th century, John Dewey was critical of teacher development as a reactive process by which educators jump from one new technique to the next; he proposed that teachers become “adequately moved by their own ideas and intelligence” in viewing teaching as a problem-solving endeavor (Dewey, 1904, quoted in Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990, p. 4). The dilemma underlying Dewey’s suggestion is that teachers may not always be able to independently think their way out of the classroom-level challenges they face, let alone solve the larger scale problems endemic to schools and education. Partnerships allow for complementary perspectives and collective strengths to be brought to bear in confronting challenges and solving problems.
Rather than forcing all music teachers to become expert researchers, or reducing research to a reflective process that teachers may find more palatable, teachers and researchers (many of whom are former PreK–12 music teachers and current music teacher educators) should be able to collaborate as equals within the educational research enterprise (Baumann, 1996; Bickel & Hattrup, 1995; Wong, 1995), provided they operate from a position of shared respect and trust. Casanova (1989) observed that teachers commonly disparage educational researchers.
[Teachers] get impatient with researchers’ unwillingness to provide solutions to their problems. They find research writing unintelligible and irrelevant to their daily concerns. . . . . Teachers tend, perhaps unconsciously, to feel they hold a lower status than researchers. This perception often inhibits them from expressing their own opinions when confronting research findings and contributes to their avoidance of articles that appear difficult and incomprehensible. (p. 45)
Researchers, on the other hand, are frequently frustrated by teachers’ lack of interest in bigger questions or broader frameworks and by their insistence on wanting research to apply to their current challenges or their unique context.
Some of the gap-bridging strategies proposed by Casanova (1989) center on reorganizing teacher work in a manner analogous to the “communities of practice” model. She suggested that researchers meet with teachers to identify the most pressing problems in education (across classrooms, teachers, and schools) and then work with teachers to design projects that are appropriately relevant, robust, and rigorous. To facilitate this collaborative model, teachers would have to develop some modicum of research know-how, but an inquiry-oriented mind-set could manifest in many ways, including a willingness to consider contradictions between classroom practice and research findings, and how such contradictions might be best resolved to ensure quality music education.
Here’s hoping the leaders charged with developing the 2020 NAfME Conference program provide a platform for constructive conversations about shared values, the role of research in music education, how educators might realize productive and meaningful collaborations with researchers, and how researchers might envision teachers as important contributors to research project conception, design, implementation, interpretation, and application. Collaborative partnerships centered on research and practice must be one of the ties that bind all members of the music education profession.