Music, Theatre, and Dance Faculty Scholarship

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    Primary Music Education in the Absence of Specialists
    (2008) Wiggins, Robert A.; Wiggins, Jackie
    Many schools worldwide rely exclusively on generalist teachers for music instruction at the primary level yet we know little about these teachers, their preparation for the task, and what they actually do in the classroom when teaching music. The extant literature in this area has focused primarily on boosting generalist teachers' confidence to teach music. Little attention has been given to their musical knowledge base and thus their competence for teaching music. This paper reports the results of an investigation of music teaching in one national school system that has almost no specialist teachers at the primary level. Drawing from questionnaire data augmented by classroom observations and interviews, the authors describe the nature and quality of music teaching in this system highlighting the issues that arose for these teachers.
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    Feeling it is how I understand it: Found poetry as analysis
    (2011) Wiggins, Jackie
    This paper tells the story of a researcher's analysis process that became a journey to an unfamiliar place and, ultimately, to a new way of conceiving analysis and a new way of seeing--at least, new to me as researcher. The study was an analysis of interview data gleaned from a series of conversations about what it is to be a musician. I had interviewed about forty highly accomplished professional musicians inviting them to talk about their musicianship and how they think they learned what they know--from whom, under what circumstances, and at what points in their lives. From transcription and analysis of the transcripts and recordings, a wide range of themes had emerged, reflecting visions of musicianship, the nature of participants' music learning experiences, and insight into their musical lives. In this paper, I explore one of these themes: the physical nature of musical knowing and experience.