Investigating ‘moments’ for student agency through a differentiated music curriculum

Research provides compelling evidence linking music-making to academic achievement and increased wellbeing for disengaged students. However, in the Australian context, education policy has narrowed its focus to literacy and numeracy, with an associated ‘accountability’ framework of mandated assessment and reporting practices. Within this context teachers are being asked to demonstrate how, through their pedagogical practices, they meet the needs of all their students. As a result of this, differentiation has become the lens through which student learning and engagement are being monitored. Drawing on data from a large state secondary school, this paper examines how a differentiated music curriculum is being implemented to support student agency. We demonstrate that, through a range of formal and informal music programs, agency is enhanced through the development of self-reflexive and self-referential learning practices. However, we suggest that differentiation, alone, does not unmask the reasons behind students’ different learning experiences nor does it necessarily redress entrenched educational inequalities. We also suggest that the ‘moments’ for student agency, created by these music programs, may have as much to do with the ‘fragile’ position of music within the broader school curriculum where the spotlight of high-stakes testing is directed elsewhere.

Beyond the habits of punishing, criticising and nagging : fostering respectful and socially just student relations using critical pedagogies

This chapter presents a pedagogical approach to fostering respectful and inclusive student relations. Rather than a narrow focus on managing or controlling students, this approach enables a broad and located view of student behaviour that seeks to develop and extend students' understandings of themselves and others. A key premise here is that many 'misbehaviours' in classrooms are associated with issues of identity and power and, in particular, the ways in which conventional classrooms and teacher-student relations tend to render students with little power or agency. Acting out or against this positioning as a means of asserting a sense of power or legitimacy is often at the root of disruptive or harmful behaviours. Thus, it is contended here that beginning to transform such behaviours necessitates an environment where students are accorded a voice and where they are supported to reflect critically on issues of power and identity in connected and meaningful ways. The chapter explores these issues with reference to the practices of 'Rachel', the deputy principal of a working-class secondary school in Queensland. Her practice is theorised drawing on the Productive Pedagogies model - a model designed as a meta-language for teachers to reflect on ways that they can integrate social justice issues within, rather than separate to, the pedagogical process. Given that boys continue to perpetuate the lion's share of disciplinary transgressions in schools, the focus in this chapter is on issues of masculinity.

Student voice and teacher accountability: possibilities and problematics

The focus in this paper is on a student voice initiative at an English secondary school designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The initiative invites Year 8 students to train and work as ‘lesson observers’ who provide feedback to teachers about their practice. The possibilities of this initiative to reflect a rich and intelligent form of teacher accountability are explored in relation to its capacity to (1) enhance students’ understanding and appreciation of teachers, teaching and the learning process; (2) support students to work in partnership with teachers to improve pedagogy and relationships; and (3) develop students’ positive self-image as learners. In its exploration of this initiative the paper also considers matters of authenticity, inclusion and power and highlights ways in which student voice initiatives can be undermined when these matters are not adequately engaged with. Such engagement, it is argued, is imperative in guarding against a misappropriation or undermining of student voice to align with traditional teacher–student power relations or to fit with the dictates of school improvement as framed by narrow and reductive measures.