Reel music teaching: a classroom music teacher reflects on the portrayal of music teaching in Mr Holland's Opus

The commercially successful movie Mr Holland's Opus tells the story of a high school music teacher throughout his thirty year career. It offers the general public a picture of what it is to be a music educator. This article outlines a critical reading of the film from the perspective of a practising high school music teacher. Three broad themes emerged in this teacher's viewing of Mr Holland's Opus: (i) general issues about teaching were identified that were not specific to music education, (ii) issues specifically about music education were critiqued as being unrealistic, and (iii) it is difficult being a musician if you are a music teacher. The themes suggest the movie has numerous possibilities for teacher reflection, as well as exposing myths about teaching which are portrayed in the mass media.     

Art Conquers All? Herbert Read's Education through Art

Herbert Read's Education through Art (henceforth ETA) is a pioneering attempt to provide empirical evidence for the need for art in the public school system. Rooting for art education, Read applies the conclusions of the newly evolving psychological research to his thesis on education, which he holds to be a contemporary revival of Plato's educational theory. Psychological research proves, Read believes, that art is required for the healthy cognitive and emotional development of the child, thereby creating a stable and productive society. ‘Education through art’ nurtures each individual's potential, so that every professional direction one would later take would be ‘art'. Since its publication in 1943, art‐education enthusiasts seem to hold that Read was on the right track, but that ETA suffers from a lack of evidence – a mere technicality that can be amended when research advances. Contrariwise, I argue that Read's thesis is inherently problematic, rather than empirically inaccurate. Psychological research may never suffice for the justification of art education, if ‘art education’ is both substituted for ‘creativity’ and expected to produce testable – immediate and quantifiable – results. My interest is not only in Read's theory per se, but in this form of justification. To wit, the discussion examines ETA as a case study in the empirical justification of art education.     

Cultivating Our “Musical Bumps” while Fighting the “Progress of Popery”: The Rise of Art and Music Education in the Mid-Nineteenth Century United States

This article seeks to understand the social and cultural factors that led to the introduction of music and art education in public schools, a process that began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Based on archival material, including institutional catalogues, school board reports, magazine articles, and tracts, I demonstrate that music and art held varied meanings in this period, one of the most important of which was denominational competition. One major element in a nationwide promotion of the arts in the mid-nineteenth century was the revitalized Protestant contest for religious adherents in the wake of Catholic immigration. A second important, and often overlooked, aspect of music and art education was its vocational implications. Although some historians have relegated women's study of music and art to the reproduction of elite status, a significant aspect of these studies was vocational. In a world in which limited occupations were open to women, skill in music and art expanded women's options and, for some, made financial independence possible. In addition, although many of the factors involved in the rise of music and art education—such as nationalism, refinement, and health—were nongendered and applied to both women and men, the repercussions of these programs were quite gendered and may add to our understanding of the process by which the teaching force was feminized.     

试论学校美育中的美术教育

学校美育中的美术教育不仅要培养学生健康的审美理想和情趣,同时还要提高其思想品质,增进其身心健康,促进其人格的全面发展。学校美育中的美术教育有循序渐进的学习和人文精神的传播等特点。加强美术史论和作品欣赏教学,可培养和提高学生感受鉴赏美的能力。通过美术实践,可培养创新意识,提高学生表现创造美的能力。学校美育中美术教育可提升学生追求更高的人生境界,引导他们保持平和的幸福心境。     

Betwixt and Between: Working Through the Aesthetic in Philosophy of Education: George F. Kneller Lecture,Conference of the American Educational Studies Association Savannah,Georgia, October 30, 2008

At a time when both philosophy of education and the arts are under threat within education, this article inquires into interdisciplinarity as one way of approaching the disciplines of philosophy of education and aesthetics. The article offers a retrospective autobiographical intellectual history and phenomenology of the author's own learning and scholarship within Higher Education in three main areas—philosophy of literature education, women's studies, and philosophy of music education, areas paralleling the three periods of her academic career. One sub-theme of this narrative about the balancing act of working in literature and music through philosophy of education is the author's ongoing resistance to professionalization or disciplinary academic control—of literature, philosophy, and music—while being a critical student of educational theory and practice in these areas—philosophy, literature and music within philosophy of education—of thus being “betwixt and between.” Two other themes comprising the article's subtext are “praxis” and “embodiment.” The double entendre of the phrase “working through” entails, first, using the arts of literature and music to practise philosophy of education; and secondly, embracing the psychological, ethical, and spiritual introspection that comes with critical engagement of the arts and its discourses. In short, the article aims to reprise some burning philosophical educational questions that have preoccupied its author over the years, questions deemed especially pertinent to the current increasingly diverse membership in the discipline of educational studies.     

音乐教育在高等职业教育中的意义与作用

音乐教育是高职教育中不可缺少的一个有机组成部分,通过音乐本身具有的独特的育人功能,不仅能提高高职学生的文化素质,而且还能促进学生全面的成长。同时,随着我国高职学生人文素质教育的不断深化,音乐教育成为对高职学生进行素质教育的重要手段。通过对音乐"开智创新"、"德育美育"、"陶冶情操"、"健康保健"几个方面的论述,揭示了音乐教育对大学生素质培养所具有的重要作用。     

Affinity and interpretation in oral histories of art education

In the pursuit of my doctoral research on the institutional history of the art department at Central Technical School (CTS) in Toronto, Canada, I amassed a collection of oral histories from 20 current and former CTS art instructors and students, recorded across the country. As an instructor in the CTS art department in addition to being its historian, I set out to produce a comprehensive and multifocal account of the history of this transgenerational community of which I am a part. The following article focuses on one research participant in particular: Sue Shintani, a former student and long-time program volunteer, whose recollections of the CTS art department helped to form an interwoven narrative of the men and women who taught at or attended this hybrid location of applied and fine art education. Sue's insights stretch over 60 years, from her experience as a high school student in the 1950s, to her time as adult student in the 1990s, to her role as a school volunteer up to the present day. In this reflective examination, I ask whether it can be claimed that the quality of oral history research correlates with the depth of the interpersonal relationship between interviewer and interviewee.     

The Creation of the ‘Hong Kong Visual Arts Education Web’ and the Use of the Inquiry‐Based Teaching Approach

This article describes a collaborative action research conducted by a lecturer and several primary school art teachers, who between 2001 and 2006 created the Visual Arts Education Web (‘iii web’) in Hong Kong. The creation of the ‘iii web’ was accomplished through research that employed questionnaires, focus group discussions and individual interviews. Teachers' perceptions of using websites in teaching were examined, art education websites from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and the USA were compared, in order to create a website that could meet the needs of Hong Kong primary school art teachers. Inquiry‐based learning is one of the important teaching approaches that were introduced during the Hong Kong Education Reform in 2003. An example of using the ‘iii web’ to teach public art is described to illustrate how the teacher and students used inquiry‐based learning in art education.     

运用音乐艺术教育 创新学生管理工作

随着中国现代化进程的加快和教育改革的深化,音乐艺术教育日益受到人们的重视.根据高职院校音乐教育与学校教育管理的密切联系,教育管理者应该善于运用音乐艺术教育创新学生管理工作,引导学生进行音乐审美情趣和鉴赏能力培养,善于把握传统文化和谐理念的审美取向、激发学生创新思维,从而达到加强教育管理的目的.     

Social developments and school music education: the struggles in Hong Kong

This paper explores two current issues in the educational policies and practices of Hong Kong that have been shaped by the emergence of the nation-state and the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the UK to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997. Since this time there have been two great challenges facing music education. The first concerns how to incorporate diverse cultures, including Chinese music, into a Western-orientated music curriculum; and the second is to find a way to cultivate national identity and democracy through music education. The data presented here were collected via in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews with music teachers, school heads and assistant school heads across 40 primary and secondary schools between 2006 and 2007. The findings can be explained by referring to the shortcomings of multicultural education and the underdevelopment of democracy in Hong Kong's education system.     

Educating Student Teachers to Use Small Groups in Secondary‐school Music Classrooms

The use of small groups in teaching classroom music is often accepted in the literature and by expert teachers as a natural part of a music‐education programme. However, research indicates that the classroom teacher commonly does not make use of small‐group activities and that, when small groups are used, the results are not always positive. This article describes a teacher‐education course aimed at developing student teachers’ abilities to manage small groups in the secondary‐school music classroom, and reports the perceptions of both student teachers and teacher‐observers when the students applied their learnings in the practicum setting.     

Secondary School Art Teachers' Concepts of Teaching in Hong Kong

Recently, there has been considerable concern among art educators and cultural policy makers to promote art education in Hong Kong. The launch of the new curriculum of a discipline-based character in 1996 generated debate in the art education circle of Hong Kong. There were diverse opinions on the rationale for teaching art. Concern was expressed about the present constraints of art teaching related to teachers' ability and school administration poses another important issue that seems to inhibit further developments. This paper reports part of the findings of a study on art teachers' concepts of teaching. It explores the concepts of about 20 secondary art teachers in Hong Kong. Several categories of teaching are derived from interviews: aesthetic development, moral development, intellectual development, expression and therapy, and intellectual and aesthetic development. A scheme is developed which can be used to analyze teachers' concepts as education in or through art on a continuum from subject to learner centred.     

中英小学德育课程差异性分析及启示

小学阶段是进行品德教育的最佳年龄阶段,在小学阶段,学生的心智发育的还不完全,对世界的认识还是一种模糊的状态,任何因素都可能改变道德观念以致改变人生。所以,在这个阶段,通过各种各样的方法,引导小学生建立起正确的道德观念,道德理解、道德判断及道德品质是及其必须的。本文从课程目标、课程内容、教学方法等三个方面对中英小学德育教学进行了简要比较,并分析了英国小学德育课程对我国小学德育教育的启示。     

Living in the Past: Some Revisionist Thoughts on the Historiography of Art and Design Education

There is a ‘dominant’ history of art and design education in Britain. This has been established by five books published in the 1960s and 1970s. They are Quentin Bell's The Schools of Design (1963), Gordon Sutton's Artisan or Artist?(1967), Richard Carline's Draw They Must(1968), Stuart Macdonald's The History and Philosophy of Art Education (1970), and Clive Ashwin's Art Education: Documents and Policies 1768–1975 (1975). They all offer a substantially corroborative account of the history of art and design education based on their predecessor. This is particularly evident in their explanation of the origin of public art and design education in Britain in the early nineteenth century. After a gap of thirty years Stuart Macdonald's book is to be republished. The news is a cause for celebration but also for concern, in that its reappearance may well further entrench the dominance of the collective voice of these five books. In an attempt to keep historical research alive and kicking in the field of art and design education, this article challenges the explanation offered by these authors for the introduction of public art and design education in the 1830s.     

Transformative Partnerships: Designing School‐Based Visual Arts Outreach Programmes

Partnerships between informal learning environments and schools have been cited as an innovative, effective way for museums, galleries and schools to work together to enrich classroom curricula, support student success, and facilitate the utilisation of available community museum and cultural resources. This article reports on findings from a multi‐year, exploratory arts outreach programme for 31 elementary and secondary visual art educators from a rural school district in the American South. The outreach programme was conceived in partnership with faculty from the neighbouring university's art department, school of education and university art gallery. Utilising a partnership framework, the travelling exhibit was developed through a collaborative research relationship with the participating visual art educators. Findings from this programme indicate that travelling exhibits can be an effective mode of programme delivery for informal learning environments while also supporting the content needs for classroom arts educators if the programme stresses transformative partnerships across all invested parties.     

音乐教育声乐课教学改革的实践与思考——以集美大学艺术学院音乐教育专业开设声乐集体课为例

艺术学院音乐教育专业传统声乐课仅以一对一的授课模式,不利于调动教师与学生的教学与学习积极性,不利于优化声乐师资教育资源,因而艺术学院音乐教育专业开设声乐集体课的改革势在必行。声乐集体课可优化教师教育资源,提高教师教学与学生学习的积极性。     

加强公共艺术教育 完善中职课程结构

当前中职学校公共艺术教育的边缘化现状令人堪忧,中职学校重专业教育而轻艺术教育是违背素质教育的做法。其实,公共艺术教育的作用与意义是显而易见的,不但不妨碍各专业课的教学,反而有助于单一、枯燥的专业课的学习。公共艺术教育课程的设置以音乐、美术欣赏课为主,基础绘画技巧、乐理知识、观摩活动等为辅。要加强中等职业学校公共艺术教育、完善中职课程结构。学校培育创新人才,必须进一步深化艺术教育,严肃认真地组织实施《中等职业学校公共艺术课程教学大纲》,切实满足学生日益增长的精神文化需求。     

音乐教育对大学生综合素质的影响——基于辽宁省部分高校抽样调查

提高艺术修养,培养综合素质是高等教育的重要内容。相关调查表明,音乐教育对人的道德素质、文化素质、心理素质有重要的影响。因此,要重视普通高校公共音乐教育,并在教学内容、教学方式、艺术实践等方面进行创新与探索。     

职业技术学校德育的有效性分析及对策

德育如何着眼于新的实际,新的情况,把握当前职业学校德育工作的新特点,形成新思路,探索新路径,增强德育有效性,是德育工作面临的一大课题。根据目前职业学校在德育工作中出现的问题,本着改革创新的原则,从德育工作的态度、德育工作的生活化、德育的量化目标、德育的内容和形式的创新、德育的实施方法入手,对职业学校德育的有效性加以探索。