Community Orientated and Opportunity Learning (COOL) Music was a 12-month collaborative project between researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University and practitioners at the Edinburgh-based social enterprise Heavy Sound. The project began in October 2017 and involved 16 sessions of participatory music making with 32 'hard-to-reach' young people…

In this article, we describe the agency development in one student with special needs through Dalcroze-based music-and-movement activities. The case study was conducted in the context of classroom music education in a special school. The data were produced via a teaching experiment (from August 2015 to March 2016), in which a group (n = 13) of 15-…

Pupil voice research has been recognised in the last 15 years for its potential to re-shape the conditions of learning and help raise child engagement and standards of achievement. In music education, however, there still seems to exist a misalignment between the content of the curriculum and pupils' learning expectations and interests. The aim of…

Music education in formal settings has the last decades been characterised by informal methods borrowed from outside school. In this study we analyse situations in Swedish secondary school where pupils' experience of music outside school becomes visible in music class. Pedagogical challenges in these situations are identified that concern how to…

This article examines the sociocultural learning of popular and jazz music in communities of practice as part of secondary vocational music education in a Finnish conservatory. The research is based on performance workshops which were implemented as a joint effort between professional musicians and music students. These workshops are suggested as…

Work such as that of John Cooksey on boys' changing voices has influenced choral practice in the USA and in certain UK youth choirs, but has hitherto had little impact in UK schools where many teachers continue to believe that boys' voices "break". Different practices are found across the independent and maintained sectors of secondary…

The music industry in the 21st century uses digital technology in a wide range of applications including performance, composition and in recording and publishing. Much of this digital technology is freely available via downloads from the internet, as part of software included with computers when they are purchased and via applications that are…

School music has a comparatively low take-up rate as a qualification among English secondary school pupils. Existing research on the issue has proffered possible reasons for this phenomenon but has generally been piecemeal and undertheorised. This paper sets out a fresh theoretical perspective capable of providing a basis for systematic empirical…

I undertook this project as a 12-year-old student while studying research methods at the Children's Research Centre at the Open University. It has already been shown that doing music improves children's Mathematics and English scores. The aim of this study was to find out if it also raises the aspirations of the children taking part. A…

Fifteen-sixteen years old Fenno-Swedish compulsory school pupils' written descriptions of "strong" experiences were used for comparing (a) the frequency of experiences related to music and to other aesthetic areas (literature, drama etc.) and (b) the frequencies of music experiences related to different basic modes of confronting music:…

This study addresses the baseline assessment of pupil composing competencies at age 11+. It asks whether it might be possible for these to be evaluated by the use of a whole-class listening task. A rationale for this proposal is discussed. Results from a pilot study which administered an original audiated puzzle-task to a cohort of pupils,…

This article reports on a school-based research project into teaching composing at GCSE, setting this alongside a review of the literature. It suggests that research into cognition in composing in school students and teaching composing within a school context may be synthesised by understanding composing as problem solving. Composing is described…

This paper is the result of a research project that set out to document a group of adolescent musicians in a rural Australian secondary school as they wrote and performed their own music. The processes they developed are reflective of a cooperative approach to group composition where upwards of 21 students composed and "jammed" their way…