Abstract
One of the books I am currently reading is Walter Isaacson’s (2017) bestselling biography Leonardo da Vinci. During the past month, I also attended an exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science titled “Leonardo da Vinci: 500 Years of Genius.” Leonardo was the quintessential Renaissance Man and arguably the most creative mind in human history. His genius lies in the fact that he remained curious, observant, and imaginative in seeking answers to questions that enveloped a range of disciplines, including art, architecture, engineering, and medicine. The seeds of his ideas came to life in the form of sketches, drawings, and designs, often maintained in a collection of notebooks. Some ideas were realized, but many were not. On occasion, Leonardo abandoned ideas (e.g., flying machines) for pragmatic reasons—because the scientific knowledge and technology needed to produce successful inventions was centuries off. Other times he appeared to lose interest, or his interest moved in new directions. Isaacson describes Leonardo’s genius as being of a very human kind—earned rather than bestowed, brilliant but also flawed. “He enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the chore of completion” (p. 518).
My foray into Leonardo’s life and work has caused me to ponder the nature of ideas, particularly ideas of value that may not move beyond an early conception stage, thereby remaining inert or even unknown. How many good research ideas are never realized or brought to fruition? What happens to these ideas if they are not properly documented and subsequently discovered? Concerns about personal credit or career recognition aside, do researchers have a moral responsibility to either act on good ideas or share them with other researchers capable of doing so?
While few music education researchers exhibit a range of curiosity and accrued intellect approaching that which characterized Leonardo, many do envision and document research ideas using similar methods and tools. I know researchers who journal on a regular basis. Many music teacher educators reflect on their teaching or supervisory experiences to stimulate thinking about research projects. When discussing research ideas with students or colleagues, I like to use a whiteboard to diagram alternative models, variables, or designs and then take photos of the diagrams for subsequent reference. Even doodling, long equated with distraction or disorder, is now conceived of as a mechanism for incubating and consolidating ideas until they can be articulated more clearly. Journals, reflective narratives, diagrams, and doodles are all sources or representations of research ideas.
When I was a young researcher, one of my mentors told me about the importance of maintaining an assembly line of research projects—some in an early conception idea stage, some being developed and refined, some awaiting necessary approvals, some in the implementation stage, some in the analysis and interpretation stage, and some in presentation/publication stage. Following this advice, I would chart the course of various projects across the academic year calendar to monitor progress while also ensuring that the project pipeline was not running dry. I kept this system functioning at a fairly productive level through the first decade or so of my higher education career, until children and administrative responsibilities necessitated reducing the volume of my research pipeline. But the pipeline has never run dry. Ideas keep coming.
For years, I have compiled and organized research ideas into folders. When folders have become too unwieldly, I have turned to binders. File artifacts typically include clipped newspaper columns, pages torn out of magazines, multipage excerpts from dissertations or published articles with key information highlighted, margin notes written on presentation handouts or conference program pages, and scraps of paper capturing personal eureka moments. These artifacts represent my “What if?” curiosities, more defined ideas for extending existing lines of research, and inspirations drawn from the work of other researchers. Over time, and with advances in technology, I have relied more on a digital file of condensed notes taken on my laptop at professional meetings, PDFs of interesting or salient articles, and the voice memo feature on my smart phone. But the concept has remained the same. I keep these ideas at hand (if not in mind), with the intention of leverage the information when time and circumstances allow the work of research to be done. Or so I have hoped.
Recently, while doing some cleaning in my home office, I came across an old folder of research ideas in print form: an announcement for grant funding to conduct research with large data sets; a proposal abstract for a research project focused on teacher adaptability to change that was not accepted for conference presentation; an email from one of my former master’s degree students reporting on efforts to revamp assessment strategies in her current teaching position; a scrap of paper on which I had scrawled a reminder to “Look into the viability of studying how young instrumentalists define and interpret failure”; and a chart depicting average annual salaries for selected occupations appearing in the 1986 publication A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. All these items represent ideas for research projects—ideas that I fancied enough at some point in time to document and collect. The passage of time may have rendered some of those ideas less pertinent or interesting, but others remain salient, viable, and important. Who will act on these ideas if I am unwilling or unable? How many other music education researchers have similar collections of early-stage research ideas?
Perhaps the music education researcher community should create online repositories for research ideas, in line with the ethos espoused by open-access advocates. Within the Society for Music Teacher Education, members of many Areas for Strategic Planning and Act (ASPAs) have already catalogued published research related to specific topics, and groups of researchers have formed teams focused on particular projects. But what if there were even larger consortia of researchers tasked with vetting cohesive collections of research ideas and then designing projects around the best of those ideas?
Research and development consortia already exist in the form of universities, research centers, government agencies, and multinational corporations jointly vested in supporting collaborative work on complex issues such as supercomputing, geoscience, and breakthrough medical treatments. Music education does not have the critical mass of researchers, social status, or grant funding needed to pull together consortia on that level. Consortia, however, come in many shapes and forms. They may exist within a particular discipline, for a given period of time, or focused on a specific problem. Shared purpose and pooled resources, including collective research expertise, are the essential threads.
We know of reasonably successful consortia formed to address teacher recruitment in string music education (Byo & Cassidy, 2005) and music education policy (Powers, 2014), but less is known about research consortia in music education. An aspirational model to consider is the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research or FCEIMR (Eerola, 2012), one of several research consortia sponsored by the Academy of Finland (http://www.aka.fi/en/research-and-science-policy/strategy/). The FCEIMR brought together separate 20-person research teams, including faculty and graduate students, from two Finnish universities. Team members represented diverse areas of expertise, including music perception and cognition, music therapy, music technology, music information retrieval, musicology, psychology, movement science, computational modeling, engineering, biomedicine, genetics, and neuroscience. The Centre’s mission was to explore relationships among musical engagement and various perceptual, physical, emotional, and social outcomes. Over a 4-year period, Centre researchers produced over 250 refereed publications, and they have advanced knowledge specific to musical development, music perception, music therapy, and music socialization in important ways. As Eerola (2012) observed, to effectively tackle complex issues surrounding any particular domain, topic, or idea, there must be a synergy of methods and expertise deployed within a team framework.
We do not lack worthwhile ideas for research in music education or music teacher education. What we require is greater capacity to identify the ideas that have more merit or impact potential, and then act on those ideas in a timely and coordinated way. Otherwise, we risk a Leonardo-like scenario by which creation exceeds consummation, and the ratio of ideas to finished projects continues to grow over time. In that sense, good research ideas are a terrible thing to hoard or waste.