Inquiry Project

Our inquiry project will be exploring how students’ identities are shaped by music and how this identity affects their musical education, specifically within the instrumental music program at East Side High School in Newark. It is no secret that students everywhere listen almost exclusively to popular music, and we are basing our inquiry on the assumption that this will hold true at East Side. However, within the music education community, this is rarely given more than a passing thought or acknowledgement. Much energy is focused on getting students to like classical music and the utility of classical music in instrumental instruction. However, there has been little research about how popular music might be used for instrumental instruction. A search of articles in the Journal of Research in Music Education using the term “popular music education” provides three articles listed in the top fifty search items that are specifically related to popular music as a tool for instrumental instruction. There has been slightly more research about music preferences of music students. It has been found that students almost exclusively prefer some form of popular music instead of classical or jazz.

At East Side the instrumental students are almost exclusively beginners. This is highly unusual at the high school level, and results from a lack of instrumental music programs in Newark’s elementary and middle schools. All students, regardless of the instrument they are studying, are put in the same class, resulting in significant difficulties for the music teacher. These unique conditions give us an opportunity to see specifically how musical identity shapes beginning instrumentalists’ musical education, and more specifically still at the high school level. We will be conducting our research by interviewing several students and the band director, and observing a class. We will analyze some of the music that students use and look similarities and differences between what they listen to and what they are taught in school. We will also look at research outside of the music education literature about music and identity.

Some of the questions we might ask during our interviews of students will be:

What do/don’t you like about music?

Who is your favorite musician/group? What do you like about him/her/them?

How often do you listen to music?

What kind of music did you hear growing up? Do you like that music? Why?

How does music make you feel?

What is your favorite song? What do you like about it?

What do/don’t you like about playing your instrument?

How has playing an instrument changed the way you think about music?

Are you playing the instrument you wanted to? Why did you want to play that instrument or What do you think of the instrument you are playing now?

Some questions we might ask the music teacher during our interview with him will be:

How aware are you of what your students listen to for pleasure?

Do you consciously try to use what your students listen to for pleasure as a part of instruction?

Do you notice a difference in learning styles based on what students listen to?

Do you notice a difference in enthusiasm for music based on what students listen to?

How important do you think music is to your students’ identities?

We will then try to synthesize these as a limited case study for how students’ musical identities affect music education.