Assimilation and Resistance: Becoming Music Teachers in a Marginalised Educational Context

Gardiner, R. M (2021) Assimilation and Resistance: Becoming Music Teachers in a Marginalised Educational Context. Doctoral thesis (EdD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Recent reports have consistently criticised the systematic marginalisation of music education within English schools as a direct consequence of recent governmental policy (Daubney et al., 2019; Savage & Barnard, 2019). Where student teachers are placed in schools throughout their Initial Teacher Education (ITE) year, and drawing on the premise that such professional experience influences development (Pellegrino, 2015), this thesis aims to determine how a marginalised educational context impacts upon student music teachers. Initially, I discuss important changes within educational policy over the last 30 years in relation to broader neo-liberal socio-cultural transformations. This contextualisation highlights specific tensions for music educators in relation to musical aspirations, epistemological values, curricular priority and teacher identity, and I question whether these tensions cause student teachers to assimilate or resist contextual expectations. The relationship between identity, subjectivity and socio-cultural context are therefore explored more specifically, drawing on discourse analytic principles (Fairclough, 1992; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) and Žižekian ideology (Žižek, 1989) to devise the particular theoretical and analytical approach used within this study. Consequently, a Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to student teacher reflections written throughout their ITE year to analyse changing discourse in relation to contextual experience. A key finding was how the students’ discourse dramatically changed depending on the setting, consistently assimilating each context’s dominant pedagogical priorities. Whilst this assimilation highlighted inherent pedagogical tensions between contexts, it did not stimulate resistance within any given context, nor did it cause particular professional unease. Instead, it was when one context’s priorities encroached upon another that profound challenges appeared. As these students’ university tutor, it became essential to critique my own practice and the ethical ramifications of advocating a music pedagogy that is deliberately resistant to current socio-political marginalisation given that it was apparently the very thing causing professional tension. Drawing on a Žižekian conceptualisation of subjectivity, the thesis concludes with a theoretical critique of such tensions, arguing that these moments might function as a necessary stimulus for subjectively ordinated change which itself can be the very process through which student music teacher professional agency is actually affirmed.