Session 7: Music, Technology and the Curriculum

Carola Boehm - Between Technology and Creativity; Challenges and Opportunities for Music Technology in Higher Education
Centre for Music Technology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow

A presentation at Bath Spa College University in 2001 gave me the occasion to critically reflect the existing Challenges and
Opportunities of Music Technology within Higher Education today. To integrate an interdisciplinary field, such as Music Technology, into an academic discipline-segregated structure, such as that existing in our Universities, provides, in many ways, more challenges than opportunities: in research as well as teaching and administration. Several working groups and workshops, such as the EC funded CIRCUS project (Content Integrated Research into Creative User Systems) , the
invited EPSRC Music Technology workshop as well as the invited EC "creativity and technology" , have addressed relating issues of teaching not only music technology but other creative courses in HE. Although this is within a European context, and some comparisons to the German systems are made, most issues are possibly restricted to the British continent.

This report will present an overview of this situation, fed by these workshops and my personal and professional experiences working with or in various academic institutions. As I personally am very much aware of the much larger amount of experience of many individuals working in Britain within this field, I would welcome any views and comments from the whole of the music technology community, and would hope that this report could be seen as initiating the start of, in my opinion a necessary discourse in how we teach and how we set up frameworks to facilitate the learning of this and other interdisciplinary subjects.

Georgia Nikolaidou - The Music Curriculum in Primary Schools and its Effects on Teachers and Pupils
Graduate School Education, University of Bristol, UK

This paper examines the basic features of the music curriculum in the primary schools in order to improve the music education in primary school within the reality of the world-wide educational society. Music curriculum aims to: enhance the knowledge, to improve and expand pupils' cognitive and artistic skills, reinforce the collaborative learning and evaluate the different levels of understanding. Hence, the music curriculum must be seen as an adaptive interface, which couples teacher and pupil's behaviours and attitudes, shaping a common interactive field. Based on this framework, there is a changing landscape, which affects the role of the music teacher from the traditional imparter of knowledge to the active assistant who facilitates, advises, motivates and guides the pupils based on the creative characteristics of the music curriculum. Moreover, the pupil changes from a passive recipient to an active participant within the classroom (school-society), receiving knowledge and simultaneously formulating his/her perspectives by creating, inventing, and inquiring.

The wide varieties of musical activities such as composition, performance, listening and appraising are influenced from the music curriculum, underpinning alongside the relationship between the music teacher and the pupils. In the same vein, new challenged ideas that include the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the area of music education are amplified; supporting the collaborative learning across the pupils through the music curriculum that in turns, acts as an interface between the music teacher and the pupil, which reinforces the musical activities within the classroom.

Consequently, the careful design of a music curriculum that adaptively will couple music teachers with pupils, can establish an innovative didactic landscape with many beneficial effects in the music education.

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