Image: ANU School of Music
Professor Peter Tregear oversaw the controversial overhaul of ANU’s School of Music in 2012 that moved music teaching away from one-on-one tuition towards an academic research model. He explains why in this excerpt from a Platform Paper to be released next week entitled Enlightenment or Entitlement? Rethinking Tertiary Music Education.
The biggest harbinger of dissent at ANU was the perceived threat to the primacy of the mentor-protégé model of performance teaching, and its chief manifestation, one-to-one tuition. As one critic wrote to the University at the outset of the public outcry: ‘A university does not produce innovative and strong music educators without teaching them how to make music in the form of one-to-one tuition. Giving them courses about music is fine and well, but without the central component of one-on-one teaching the music industry and all those who work within it would be lost.’
This issue became the fulcrum around which the implied debate between notions of inherit value and social responsibility hinged, because the biggest single reason for the cost blowout in running music schools on campus was that one-to-one teaching was so expensive to deliver. Under the old model it was quite possible, for instance, to have a salaried teacher at ANU delivering such tuition at an effective cost exceeding $500 per hour, far in excess of the subsidy that the current university funding model allows for a university to deliver. Inevitably, then, the change management process at ANU focused on this aspect of the curriculum in particular.
The public passion for this model is understandable. Any of us who have been privileged to have such music tuition provided to us as a child will recognise the educative value and power of the mentor-protégé relationship. At its best, arguably, it cannot be bettered; and for this reason alone the reformed ANU School of Music curriculum still offers more one-to-one teaching across its undergraduate programs than any other comparable institution in the country.
However, there were, and remain, substantial economic and cultural reasons for why the primacy of this model of teaching deserved to be reassessed and the ANU School of Music has as a result reformed the way it delivers such teaching.
The economic argument is simple to state—salaried staff appointed on the basis of their ability to undertake studio one-to-one teaching cannot commonly generate enough income-earning work through the year—say by attracting research income during the non-teaching periods or by taking lecture based courses concurrently with studio teaching—to justify the cost of their appointment. The process of de-coupling this kind of teaching delivery from the university academic employment system was inevitable as it was painful.
The arguments in support such a de-coupling, however, are more than just economic. The most significant were given particular expression in a story that, in its most dramatic form broke almost a year to the day after the changes to the ANU School of Music were announced. On 7 May 2013, the UK’s Channel 4 news ran a lead story that revealed an endemic culture of harassment and abusive behaviour at all five of the UK’s specialist music schools. A national debate, still ongoing, about the educational culture of these schools followed. Aside from specific allegations, what emerged in the subsequent press reports were frequent criticisms of the broader ‘hot house’ culture that existed in these schools in which one-to-one lessons were singled out as being especially ‘open to exploitation’. One teacher, for instance, was quoted as saying some tutors, often revered musicians, were treated like ‘objects of worship’ with a ‘cultish’ and ‘quite frenzied’ atmosphere around them.’
UK pianist and musicologist Ian Pace (a graduate of Chetham’s who has, since the story broke, been prominent in calling for a national enquiry in the UK) believed that the ‘fundamental emphasis’ placed on one-to-one teaching fostered a high level of dependency in which pupils could fall ‘under the spell of that teacher, who is their passport to success, and pleasing him or her becomes paramount’.
We could perhaps contemplate the potential problems of one-to-one teaching more abstractly by invoking William Perry’s well-known Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development. Perry was a professor of education at Harvard who studied the cognitive development of college-age students through the 1950s and 60s. He eventually proposed a theory of intellectual and cognitive development which at root proposes that a successful process of learning advances from an initial acceptance by the student of black-and-white truths to an understanding that there are multiple, conflicting claims to truth that require evaluation and justification. It can be summarised as follows:
1. Dualism/Received Knowledge: There are right/wrong answers, engraved on golden tablets in the sky, known to authorities.
2. Multiplicity/Subjective Knowledge: There are conflicting answers; therefore, students must trust their ‘inner voices’, not an external authority.
3. Relativism/Procedural Knowledge: There are disciplinary reasoning methods. Students realise the necessity of making choices and committing to an answer.
4. Commitment/Constructed Knowledge: Students integrate their knowledge with knowledge learned from others. They recognise the role of personal experience and reflection in arriving at an answer, and that committing to an answer entails an acceptance of responsibility for the consequences.
When I have approached colleagues and asked them where on this scheme they would place one-to-one teaching, the answer has almost invariably been at level (1). No doubt this reflects a crude simplification of what mentor-protégé teaching should be, and in most cases is a caricature of what it actually is. Their perception, however, is not totally without foundation. For instance, an anonymous posting on Norman Lebrecht’s music blog discussing the UK recalled an experience of one-to-one teaching as one characterised by ‘[a] feeling of isolation compounded by the idea that I was someone’s student and they were my teacher. There was almost a discouragement of seeking any substantial amount of advice from peers or being able to have multiple lessons with other musicians—not just the odd masterclass or lesson but a sustained period of engagement with other people’s ideas about playing and music in general. It is this almost antisocial approach to music, and the implication that your teacher knows best and others’ ideas are inferior and/ or damaging/confusing, that is unhealthy and can lead to the ‘cult’ that some have described above. In turn, this can lead to the silence about the abuse that’s happened through fear and unquestioned respect for these perceived titans of the music world.’
Research by Elizabeth Haddon into the development of students’ instrumental/vocal learning at tertiary music schools has added scholarly weight to the assertion that the traditional institutional culture of a conservatoire can make it difficult or even impossible for students to voice their concerns around the segregated learning environment of one-to-one teaching. In such an environment the teacher has a position of considerable power, and the overarching institution has to rely on high standards of probity, self-criticism and service from the teacher her- or himself.32 Relative to today’s highly regulated peer-assessed environment of the lecture theatre, the level of educational risk in the instrumental studio is high.
Conversely, there is significant recent research to suggest that there are considerable educational benefits to be had if students are offered a mix of one-to-one and group teaching, such as Ryan Daniel’s study of group piano tuition from 2008; or Hunter and Russ’s investigation into peer assessment. Research by Don Lebler (2007) explored the possibility of teachers reconceiving their role as more that of an adviser who encouraged critical thinking skills and independence; and suggested that such a practice could help avoid the trap of teacher-dependency and foster self-directed learning such as would be necessary once a student entered the profession.
This is an extract from Enlightenment or Entitlement? Rethinking Tertiary Music Education, a Platform Paper from Currency House to be published on 1 February
