Setting and methods

We chose to approach the study with an ethnographic orientation, so as to construct a rich thick description (Geertz, Reference GEERTZ1973) of the way music-related ideas are used and relate to each other in a specific context. The sensitising questions used to guide the study were:

The study was conducted in music lessons at two secondary schools in London. The two schools were chosen after contacting a small selection of comprehensive secondary schools in the London area with music programmes.

• • School A was located in East London, with around 1200 students. The school had c. 65% of students receiving free school meals; c. 15% having special educational needs; and c. 50% obtaining five or more A*–C GCSEs and equivalent in 2010. The music department had six full-time music teachers, plus peripatetic teachers. It was a participating department in the Paul Hamlyn Foundation ‘Musical Futures’ scheme (Hallam et al., Reference HALLAM, CREECH, SANDFORD, RINTA and SHAVE2008).

• • School B was located in West London, with around 1000 students. The school had c. 25% of students receiving free school meals; c. 15% having special educational needs, and c. 30% obtaining five or more A*–C GCSEs and equivalent in 2010. The performing arts department had two full-time music teachers, plus peripatetic teachers.

The research was conducted over the period November 2010 – March 2011, and encompassed a variety of KS3 and 4 classes in the departments as well as break times and lunch hours. (Most lunch hours were spent eating alongside staff in a room with various students coming in, asking questions, taking/returning equipment, and were a valuable liminal component of the immersion.) The unit of study was not a particular class, but the general interaction between teachers, students and musical ideas within the schools. A variety of lessons were encountered including Music GCSE lessons in both schools, Music Technology BTEC lessons in School B, and a Year 8 music performance project in School A.

Notes were taken by one researcher with notebook and pen: these notes included conversations, sketches of room layouts and people's positions/actions, and transcriptions of notices, posters, Powerpoint slides and screen layouts. The researcher was largely positioned in an observer role, but would occasionally assist with lesson topics, equipment, or even playing an instrument. To minimise disruption and facilitate access, video/audio recording were not used. We also chose not to conduct planned/formal interviews, but to focus on a combination of observations and in situ conversations with teachers and students. This was partly to minimise disruption but also in order to focus more on the members’ words and actions in the context of use, and also to reduce the likelihood of our visits being perceived as evaluative (cf. Emerson et al., Reference EMERSON, FRETZ and SHAW1995, p. 140; O'Reilly, Reference O'REILLY2005, ch. 5).

Analysis of the field-notes was conducted with coding and thematic analysis, following Emerson et al. (Reference EMERSON, FRETZ and SHAW1995). We started with open coding, annotating each small segment of the field-notes in sequential order, entertaining all analytic possibilities. We then collated these annotations and organised them manually by similarity, so that themes emerged from related topics appearing again and again. Each strongly represented cluster of codes was selected as a theme. The strong themes related to the sensitising questions (above) were all selected for the next stage of analysis, which was to go through the field-notes again with a more focused coding based on the themes. This was then the basis of the written report which elaborated on each theme, with field-note excerpts selected to provide the primary structure for discussion of each theme.

The following presents some of the themes which emerged clearly from our analysis. We do not have space to present all themes, but have included those which relate to current topics around formal/informal music, technology and the classroom. All personal names of teachers/students are pseudonyms.

Classroom dynamics: authorised, unauthorised and casual activity

Our first theme arising from the data analysis concerns the dynamics of what activity is authorised and unauthorised in class, and how this is negotiated. This is not the same issue as the formal/informal distinction, but it is related: in a music lesson there are often moments of informal music – for example a group of friends singing a current pop song together – and such activity could be incorporated into the lesson, or could be disallowed. The management of this boundary is also relevant when considering specific technologies, such as whether or not mobile phones are permitted.

From our observations of the everyday detail of interactions in music lessons, a strong pattern emerged: there is almost never a clear division between what might be formal and informal modes of activity, or between activity that might be authorised by the teacher and that which might not. A large proportion of students’ time is spent in activities whose status is ambiguous: for example engaging in exploratory or creative tasks, or conversations with others. When the status is negotiated between teacher and student, it is almost never based on a priori categories but emerges from the negotiation of many very local factors – often unpredictable in advance.

There are of course exchanges with the teacher in which the authorised/unauthorised status emerges, and often a teacher will instruct students to do certain things (we will call this ‘mandated’ activity) – but students’ activities evolve quickly through their interaction with learning materials, tools and other people, and very quickly progress beyond the most recent point of negotiation. So most of the time students are engaged in what we will refer to as ‘casual’ activity – not meaning off-topic activity but activity whose authorised/unauthorised status is ambiguous, but could be crystallised by teacher/student negotiation. The flow between these modes of activity is depicted in Figure 1.

Fig. 1

Movement between different modes of activity. The double-thickness arrows are changes occurring through explicit status negotiation.

As one brief illustration, the following excerpt is one of many in which students spontaneously sing together, in a way not directly related to a class task but for enjoyment. The class is a Year 10 class of about a dozen male students at School B:

Here the teacher co-opts the situation to encourage the students to explore singing in a tiny informal activity, and connects it with the idea of a barbershop quartet (possibly why she asks a fourth student to join in). The students’ attitude to singing is here playful and social, sitting outside specifically evaluated tasks. The teacher authorises the activity and directs it. In other superficially similar instances, moments of singing might be either unauthorised or left ambiguous. There is no a priori status of such informal activities, but teachers and students are able to negotiate the status as needed.

We emphasise that our assertion of this pattern is not just a relativist refusal to acknowledge a difference between students following and straying from the lesson plan. Firstly, it is not just the teacher who decides what is authorised, but it is often negotiated between teacher and student. Nor is it only activity specified by the teacher that is authorised. Nor is the decision based on general properties such as the mode employed: for example sometimes a visit to YouTube is authorised or mandated, sometimes teachers disallow it.

More fundamentally, though, students’ actions evolve quickly in interaction with many things around them (socially and physically), and even if one particular action is authorised/unauthorised by a teacher's intervention, the students’ activity very quickly moves beyond that specific action. Further, students are often assigned open-ended and creative tasks, which is important for their learning and their engagement in learning; in such conditions, actions or discussions which have only tangential relation to the formal curriculum topic are very likely, and their authorised/unauthorised status may emerge later after discussion with a teacher, or may never be stated.

The next excerpt shows a rather different classroom context, yet the same issues emerge of technological freedoms and constraints, student exploratory activity, and negotiation between teacher and students about the status of different activities. It is from a Year 10 lesson at School A, in which the main activity is to use a music sequencer to create a beat pattern:

The technological means of allowing/preventing activity (the screen lock) used in this excerpt is a relatively blunt instrument, here under the active control of the teacher and used to direct attention towards the teacher at specific points in the lesson.

However, the more subtle interaction is around what kind of activities with the sequencer are allowed or disallowed. In this lesson the students are set a creative task, with apparent freedom apart from the advice to ‘keep it simple’. The students who write their names into the sequencer screen are exploring the software in what appear to be actions intended to fulfil the task (they aren't attempting to subvert the lesson), and create patterns that sound interesting to them. However, the loops that these students find interesting to make are clearly not the loops that the teacher wants them to produce, although they are nominally in a position of creative freedom. The teacher progressively clarifies the types of pattern expected, marking some rhythm patterns as unauthorised by judging them (from visual appearance) as ‘too busy’, by deleting one of them, and by indicating another student's work as a better example.

The circulation of the idea of making a rhythmic pattern from one's name shows a small-scale example of informal learning occurring in class. The excerpt shows a tension between this and the intentions of the teacher – note, however, that we selected this excerpt because the tension leads to explicit discussion which is useful for our exposition. More generally, the school (and the teacher) made wide use of approaches inspired by informal learning considerations.

Both the excerpts presented in this section illustrate occasions where explicit work is done to negotiate the boundary between authorised and unauthorised, regarding student activity that has informal aspects. However, such negotiation is relatively rare in actual classroom interactions; in between these occasions, much activity occurs whose status is ambiguous (we have labelled this ‘casual’ activity). In the next section, we will see similar issues surrounding mobile phones and MP3 players, with specific instances of negotiation but also periods of ambiguity.

Some of the educational debate in recent years has considered the relation of informal musics to music education, and how they can usefully be brought into the classroom. Our observations offer a slightly different perspective on this. When one looks in detail at what happens in a music lesson, the distinction between formal and informal types of activity (the position on Folkestad's (Reference FOLKESTAD2005) axis) diminishes, since the majority of activities have no explicit status and almost all activities evolve quickly due to the interactions of participants.

In the following two sections we will consider some specific technologies which we observed to have an interesting role in classroom interactions. They are technologies whose role is more commonly associated with social and informal music listening.

Mobile phones and MP3 players

Our analysis found themes emerging around mobile phones and MP3 players, in particular relating to the authorised/unauthorised status questions discussed above. These devices are a popular vehicle for music audio/video (Nielsen Company, 2009), and they are generally the students’ own, brought into the school rather than provided by the school; so they might be considered a key route by which social and informal musics might find their way into the music classroom.

Both the schools studied had official bans on student use of mobile phones. School B displayed this sign prominently in the entrance hall:

However, despite the official prohibition, phones were quite often brought out for various purposes in both schools, for class-related and more social purposes. The following excerpt is from a Year 8 lesson in School A, in which the teacher (Andy) was facilitating a group of six students in a small studio room, learning to play together as a band:

This excerpt reflects a pattern that was common across both schools, of students using mobile phones or MP3 players to introduce their liked music into class. The use of these devices was not barred by teachers but managed, to allow students’ music choices to be part of the lesson.

The following excerpt (from a lesson with about a dozen Year 10 students in School B) shows some of the explicit negotiation about the status of mobile phones and/or MP3 players:

The earlier negotiation about iPod-vs-phone, and the teacher's response to the young student's question, show the active negotiation of the possible boundaries between authorised and unauthorised, as well as between phone and MP3 player. The teacher's response to the question shows a motivation to uphold the general rule against mobile phone use (‘I have been doing [. . .] You wouldn't do it in English’) while explaining the apparent contradiction, through two possibly contradictory justifications: either by saying the infraction is minor (‘it's last minute’) or that phones are allowed in music lessons (‘It's Music, we do it a bit different, they use it for their coursework’ – though in this instance the phones aren't being used for coursework).

The next excerpt is from the same class group but a few weeks later, in which the class has been set a task to come up with some TV/radio publicity, including appropriate music. The excerpt illustrates further the way phones are pushed to either side of the authorised/unauthorised divide according to subtle local factors:

In this excerpt mobile phones are permitted as part of the lesson activity, but still there is subtle negotiation needed to keep activity within the realm of what the teacher wants. There appear to be engagement benefits for the students in bringing their own social music practices into the activity.

Further, these practices which the students can bring into the classroom are good ways to facilitate the music sharing that is at the heart of many discussions in music lessons. We observed many occasions in which students used their earphones with their phones/MP3 players to share music privately with others. The above excerpt includes playing music out loud, which can sometimes be considered disruptive (and censured by the teacher) but not always, and not in this case.

Many schools operate ‘blanket bans’ on mobile phones (mentioned for example in Savage (Reference SAVAGE2010)), but according to our observations these are not quite what they seem. Irrespective of the possibility that school administrations should adopt a more nuanced policy on mobile phones (a debate for the schools themselves), these devices are found in school music lessons in an interesting state of fluidity regarding their authorised/unauthorised status, since they are a useful vehicle for bringing some informal music practices into class. Both teachers and students make use of this fluidity. As Baxter (Reference BAXTER, Finney and Burnard2009) notes, ‘The challenge for the music teacher is to keep abreast of such developments and to find ways of utilizing them for positive means, thus continuing to build the bridge between out of school and in school’ (Baxter, Reference BAXTER, Finney and Burnard2009, p. 62).

As music technologists, we are interested in modes of music sharing, including digital file-sharing which has received some media attention. In our study it was interesting to note that sharing earphones was by far the most common way of sharing music which we encountered. Our observations concur with those of Bickford (Reference BICKFORD2008) who considers in detail the material culture of MP3 players and earphone sharing. However, Bickford places earphone sharing in opposition to institutional regulations; an additional component which we observed was local strategies that teachers employ to navigate an authorised path between the two.

YouTube

One of the most heavily used technologies in the classes we observed was YouTube.Footnote ¹ YouTube's breadth of coverage appears to be what supports its thorough integration into classroom practice: students and teachers often searched on YouTube without having checked in advance whether they would find something relevant, and almost always found a video which satisfied them. YouTube was used by teachers and by students for many purposes. We observed uses including:

• • Playing a song to support a lesson topic (e.g. to demonstrate a musical style).

• • Playing documentaries about musical topics.

• • Playing examples of live performance.

• • Playing a track to work out its chords and/or instrumentation.

• • Playing a ‘with-lyrics’ video of a track (showing animated lyrics rather than a music video), to work out or sing along to the lyrics.

• • Playing a track to perform along to (playing instruments and/or dancing).

• • Playing back old TV/radio adverts (to demonstrate the use of music in them).

• • Playing background music quietly.

• • Finding sound effects or soundtrack elements whose audio could be ripped and used.

• • Music sharing (playing liked music to others).

There was a strong overlap between teachers’ and students’ initiation of YouTube for these uses, and a strong overlap in whether the projected screen or a student's individual screen was used for playback.

Contrary to the suggestions made by Webb (Reference WEBB2007), YouTube usage was generally not oriented around carefully planned and structured video-based activities, but as a resource casually integrated into many multimodal activities. (Another resource we saw often used, and treated in the same way, was Wikipedia.) YouTube (as Wikipedia) has the important features of very broad coverage plus a good free-text search, allowing teachers and students to use it at short notice without having to consider in advance whether material will be found.

Indeed, YouTube's broad coverage even within the music domain often makes it the most reliable source of material, as demonstrated in this excerpt in which some Year 8 students and two teachers go to the web to find the chords for a song they want to play:

In this excerpt the teacher Evan starts with Spotify. No-one explicitly says why the karaoke versions retrieved are unsatisfactory – possibly because it's less obvious how the music fits with the words, possibly because they might not be faithful to the original. The principal issue discussed is the chord sequence, which one might think would be evident in the karaoke versions. Whatever the reason, in this case YouTube rather than Spotify is the destination for the successful search for music playback. This is followed by a generic web search for chord information, a type of information for which the teachers/students don't reach for YouTube.

The above excerpt featured the use of YouTube on the small screen (though as a group activity). All classrooms studied featured a projector screen – an interactive whiteboard (IW) – at the front of the room, and these too were often used for showing YouTube videos. One might assume that video on the projected screen is used primarily by teachers for presenting content to the whole class, while students’ video use happens on the small screen. In a different context, Shannon and Cunningham (Reference SHANNON and CUNNINGHAM2009) explore the subtle design factors which can reinforce this division, despite the fact that IWs can be used for multi-party at-screen activities. However, in our study we witnessed many occasions when students used the large screen, sometimes to show something to a large class group but often just because of the conveniently visible screen and/or the loudspeakers attached to that computer.

The following excerpt takes place during a Year 10 class at School B, with the class divided into groups, each learning to play/sing a specific pop song. Most groups had been led out to practice rooms, and one group of five students remained in the main classroom:

This excerpt shows YouTube used by the students as the source for lyrics and a track to play along to, part of a multimodal activity combining audio, lyrics and instruments. The musicians play to the video as a reference, but one singer occasionally rewinds the video in a way that clashes with the musicians’ playing, exerting a slightly disruptive control.

The excerpt also shows some interaction between the big and small screen (both showing the same content), with the teacher requesting that the students sit by the small screen, while a student expresses a preference for sitting looking towards the projected screen – though specific reasons for these contrasting preferences are not evident.

This and the previous example show some of the many and varied uses that teachers and students make of internet video, and how this is facilitated by the exhaustive one-stop shop that is YouTube. It is not just the availability of this video but its ease of retrieval (by text query) that enables these activities. The use of YouTube is in general quite different from that advocated by Webb (Reference WEBB2007), who argues for designing tasks around a specific video. Instead, teachers and students often call up videos at short notice as part of ongoing discussions or tasks.

To summarise, we observed use of YouTube very strongly integrated into the music classroom in many ways, on the small screen and the large screen, deployed by both teacher and student.

YouTube's advantage is not just the provision of on-demand video, but its extremely broad library of content and good text search, allowing for ad hoc use within a class activity. Along with mobile phones and MP3 players, it is a convenient route for connecting with informal listening practices, allowing students to bring their own preferred musics into discussion. This usage probably aligns very well with students’ use outside school, although we did not investigate this ourselves. See for example Cunningham et al. (Reference CUNNINGHAM and NICHOLS2008), who studied a cohort of undergraduate students, finding that YouTube is the dominant use of Internet video in many situations, and that the text search is the most important route in to watching videos.

We note that Savage's (Reference SAVAGE2010) survey of ICT usage in secondary schools does not make mention of these modes of ICT use. YouTube is a free web-based service, and so does not appear in a list of ICT purchases. However, it (and other services such as Wikipedia) should not be overlooked for their role in current music educational practice. Nor should they be omitted from critical discussion of the influence of single large commercial providers on music education. Heavy reliance on a single provider does bring dangers, such as being dependent on the availability and the whims of that provider. This is true even if the provision is not through direct purchase.

However, having emphasised the role of specific recent technologies in the modern music classroom, we next wish to place them more clearly in their multimodal context.

Multimodality: high- and low-tech together

Discussion of technology often focuses on the most recent hi-tech innovations, since they are an area of conspicuous change. Much of our own discussion thus far has had this focus. However, in our study we found a consistent pattern of untroubled integration of a wide range of different modalities with each other, in many different configurations. This included ICT but also posters, felt-tips, post-it notes, mime, singing and more. We have highlighted mobile phones and YouTube in the present paper, but their role as learning resources was not different in kind to the lower-tech or more traditional resources. Generally, they were one of the rich array of resources available in the music classroom that could be drawn upon at short notice.

Examples of this were seen in the sections above: for example when students combined a phone with a microphone and speaker to play music back, or when students played a YouTube video on the IW screen, and used instruments and singing to play along with it.

Various resources could often lie latent for a long time, and be called up at short notice. We observed this in the case of posters: many music classrooms had music-themed posters around the walls, and for weeks we saw no interaction with them at all. One might have concluded they had become unnoticed background for the teachers and students. Then one day, a conversation about composers brought a poster into direct use (in fact it was pulled off the wall and laid on a table). Posters are a type of resource which, like internet-based resources, allow for this latency because their maintenance cost is extremely low.

We consider the issue of multimodality in this study further in a separate work (Stowell & Dixon, Reference STOWELL and DIXON2011). (See also Kress et al., Reference KRESS, CHARALAMPOS, JEWITT and OGBORN2006, esp. Chapter 2, on the thoroughgoing multimodality in a school science lesson.) Here we note that both high- and low-technology appeared to be well-integrated in the classes we observed. Unlike previous studies (Lamont et al., Reference LAMONT, HARGREAVES, MARSHALL and TARRANT2003; Savage, Reference SAVAGE2010) we saw no particular evidence of teachers’ lag in ICT skills, which might act as a brake on successful integration. However, there may have been an element of self-selection of technologically confident schools in our study so we do not propose to generalise this particular point.