Who pays and who plays? Mapping the discourse of publicly funded instrumental music education in Ireland

Instrumental music education is provided as an extra-curricular activity on a fee-paying basis by a small number of Education and Training Boards, formerly Vocational Education Committees (ETB/VECs) through specialist instrumental Music Services. Although all citizens’ taxes fund the public music provision, participation in instrumental music during school-going years is predominantly accessed by middle class families. A series of semistructured interviews sought to access the perceptions and beliefs of instrumental music education practitioners (N=14) in seven publicly-funded music services in Ireland. Canonical dispositions were interrogated and emergent themes were coded and analysed in a process of Grounded theory. The study draws on Foucault’s conception of discourse as a lens with which to map professional practices, and utilises Bourdieu’s analysis of the reproduction of social advantage to examine cultural assumptions, which may serve to privilege middle-class cultural choice to the exclusion of other social groups. Study findings show that within the Music Services, aesthetic and pedagogic discourses of the 19th century Conservatory system exert a hegemonic influence over policy and practice. An enduring ‘examination culture’ located within the Western art music tradition determines pedagogy, musical genre, and assessment procedures. Ideologies of musical taste and value reinforce the more tangible boundaries of fee-payment and restricted availability as barriers to access. Practitioners are aware of a status duality whereby instrumental teachers working as visiting specialists in primary schools experience a conflict between specialist and generalist educational aims. Nevertheless, study participants consistently advocated siting the point of access to instrumental music education in the primary schools as the most equitable means of access to instrumental music education. This study addresses a ‘knowledge gap’ in the sociology of music education in Ireland. It provides a framework for rethinking instrumental music education as equitable in-school musical participation. The conclusions of the study suggest starting-points for further educational research and may provide key ‘prompts’ for curriculum planning.

Functional educational characterisation of the utility of embalming fluids for anatomical education and research

Human cadavers have long been used to teach human anatomy and are increasingly used in other disciplines. Different embalming techniques have been reported in the literature; however there is no clear consensus on the opinion of anatomists on the utility of embalmed cadavers for the teaching of anatomy. To this end, we aimed to survey British and Irish anatomy teachers to report their opinions on different preservation methods for the teaching of anatomy. In this project eight human cadavers were embalmed using formalin, Genelyn, Thiel and Imperial College London- Soft Preserving (ICL-SP) techniques to compare different characteristics of these four techniques. The results of this thesis show that anatomy teachers consider hard-fixed cadavers not to be the most accurate teaching model in comparison to the human body, although it still serves as a useful teaching method (Chapter 2). In addition, our findings confirm that joints of cadavers embalmed using ICL-SP solution faithfully mimics joints of an unembalmed cadaver compared to the other techniques (Chapter 3). Embalming a human body prevents the deterioration in the quality of images and our findings highlight that the influence of the embalming solutions varied with the radiological modality used (Chapter 4). The method developed as part of this thesis enables anatomists and forensic scientists to quantify the decomposition rate of an embalmed human cadaver (Chapter 5). Formalin embalming solution showed the strongest antimicrobial abilities followed by Thiel, Genelyn and finally by ICL-SP (Chapter 6). The overarching viewpoint of this set of studies show that it is inaccurate to state that one embalming technique is ultimately the best. The value of each technique differs based on the requirement of the particular education or research area. Hence we highlight how different embalming techniques may be better suited to certain fields of study.