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Creativity is a “popular but heterogeneous word” (Gibson 2005) in current educational discourse. Composing is creative act, and the National curriculum for music in the UK places a statutory requirement on the teaching and learning of composing music for all pupils in schools up to age 14. The notion of creativity is to be found in many curricular contexts, some more dubious than others, yet in the case of composing in schools we, as teachers, are asking our pupils to bring something into being which did not exist before. Boden (1990) has argued that we ought to consider creative endeavours of young people as existing in two kinds. These she labels ‘p-creative’, to mean they are psychological, in the sense of having occurred to an individual; and those which although coming into being in the same fashion, also have an historical import beyond that of the immediate, these she designates ‘h-creative’. It is the ‘p-creative’ acts which occur on a daily basis in the music classroom which are of concern to us. The pieces of music produced by the children may not be of historical significance, but they are new for that child, and so are worthy of consideration in that sense.
The normal mode of teaching and learning composing at KS3 is in groups. This is the case for a number of reasons, including the educational and the pragmatic. Working in groups allows the pupils to distribute the composing process between themselves, and allows them to work in their Zones of Proximal Development (Vygotsky 1978; 1987), thus working at a higher level than might otherwise be the case. Pragmatically, composing in groups allows the pupils to work directly with sound, and maximises available instrumental resources. Typically pupils will compose with instruments which are then used for the final performance. This makes composing an active process, where the focus is on fashioning and organising sounds.
This brings us to the important focus for teaching and learning, the process of composing. Public examinations such as GCSE, AS-level, and A2-level, tend only to look at the finished product – the piece of music which is presented and performed. This by-and-large ignores the processes which were gone through to arrive at this stage.
For classroom composing at KS3 there is a difference between composing – the process of making, and composition – the piece of music which emerges from the process. Sawyer (2003) in a different context refers to the latter as the emergent, as it emerges from the process. This process-product dichotomy can present the KS3 classroom teacher with a dilemma, as public valorisation of music is inevitably of product.
Music does not wear its production techniques on its sleeve in the way that some other art forms do, and so the teacher has to focus pupil attention onto the means of production, onto the process of composing. This does not mean that the emergent composition can be ignored, rather that the focus of teaching and learning is sharply on the process.
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