Contrasting Didactics in Song-leading

Abstract

Music and song singing is a widely used mean of expression and of cultural transmission between adults and children. In many institutions, this practice is led mainly by generalist teachers. Children’s songs can be analyzed as specific objects that sum up and exemplify a coherent use of musical structures and rules, showing how they can be considered, as such, a cornerstone of the music education dispensed by generalist teachers in schools. Previous studies focus on the teacher’s actions during music lessons from an evaluating standpoint. In our research, we focus on describing and understanding the phenomenon from a didactic standpoint: we question what rules underlie the actions, what aspects of the actions are relevant for the teacher, what insight guides our observation as researchers, through video analysis of lessons, interviews while viewing the filmed lessons, and field notes. In this presentation, I report on two contrasting case studies of experienced generalist teachers. Using the transcription system “Lesson Activities Map” (LAMap), created by our research team, I visualize the most important actions in a music lesson’s sequencing, focusing on how the teachers organize the lesson. In-depth analysis of important episodes allows us to characterize the appearance of meaningful events: the way a specific song element is introduced provides detailed insights on the teachers’ ability of explicitly or implicitly navigating the different rules and norms of each stratus of the song leading phenomenon in a way that allows them to follow, or fall out of, their self-determined course of action.