Music, Inclusion and Creativity
Music, Inclusion and Creativity blog 2
In this blog I’ll describe the contexts of my research and how inclusion was enacted by the music organisation I worked with.
Intro
For my British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, I wanted to work with children and young people who have Additional Support Needs, both in mainstream and special schools and examine relationships between music, creativity and wellbeing. All of these elements are complex and overlapping so I made a decision early on to work with an inclusive music organisation. This allowed me to observe what expert teams of practitioners did and use this to reflect on inclusion and what kinds of communication support this.
Language pertaining to additional support needs and disability is both changeable and context dependent. This makes consistent terminology challenging. In line with the participatory research orientation of my project, I always speak to my partners any time I write about the research. For Limelight practitioners, terminology was either ‘disabled practitioner’ or’ practitioner with disabilities’. These terms will be used interchangeably to reflect diversity of preference of these adults. Additional support needs (henceforth ASN) is used to refer to under-18s who may be workshop participants it is the preferred terminology in Scotland for school-aged children.
I have been privileged to work with Limelight Music on and off since 2018, first on the Music as Social Innovation project and then on my BA postdoc project. However, I first met Limelight’s founder members Gordon Dougal and Fletcher Mathers around 16 years ago. I had been booked to work as a double bassist on a musical theatre show at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. Fletcher had one of the leading roles and Gordon contributed some of the music. This is relevant perhaps to illustrate the integratedness of professional scenes of music performance, education and community music in a small country like Scotland. It also shows that Community Music practice can be informed by a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.
What is Inclusive Music?
There are different understandings of inclusion in music education and community music research. In educational research inclusion is a contested term (Murdoch et al., 2022) often being understood as special needs education rather that education for all learners, which includes those with additional support needs (ASN) (McAuliffe, 2018). Limelight also take the view that rather than adapting an existing music education programme to accommodate specific needs or disabilities, music workshops should be inclusive of everyone in the room no matter what their needs are. This has implications for the choice of songs, instruments and activities. One of the really interesting aspects of the research was seeing Limelight work in the same school with four different classes. Workshops began in the same manner, with the same songs, however, over the course of the 9 month programme, activities quickly changed, and were personalised by and adapted for each class. Consequently, the classes had their own specially curated journey, with Limelight devising activities and songs for each group.
During workshops, practitioners found ways for everyone to join in, for example through using guitars in open tuning. They didn’t use notation, all of the activities built up songs and pieces from memory. One song which all the classes used in some way was ‘Huran Da’ (a song which uses Gaelic vocables. It is a deceptively simple with only 2 chords but I’ve seen it extended to last over 15 minutes with long improvised instrumental sections. Improvisation was a key process in finding out more about the children and young people’s interests and creativity. In this way, improvisation was an important way for practitioners to appreciate participants ideas and start to incorporate these into pieces and songs.
Delivering in teams
The teams themselves are inclusive, for example Mark, who wears hearing aids, took them out of his ears so the children in one of the classes could see them. His natural honesty is a feature of many if not all of the practitioners; there’s no sense of anyone ‘putting on’ any kind of other ‘teacher’ identity other than their own. I wrote about this ‘personalisation’ in a previous article (MacGlone et al. 2023), it means that within the company, everyone can find their own way of delivering workshops. This is within the context of team facilitation. Flexibility in leadership was also apparent, with Gordon and Fletcher stepping back and allowing trainees to lead sections of the workshops. The method of team delivery was certainly lively at times, in the special schools we worked in, ratios of staff to students are larger than in mainstream schools. As well as this, there is usually at least one other member of support staff and/or medical staff present. Practitioners included everyone in the room – much to the initial surprise of the staff. This, however, was important, having the focus of everyone in the room on the activity allowed staff to see children in new ways. Staff also learnt the songs and reported singing them at other times in the week.
The next blog will describe one workshop where a child became particularly upset, and how the practitioners, staff and other children responded to her, making music to hold space for this child until she felt better.
REFERENCES
MacGlone, U. M., Wilson, G. B., Vamvakaris, J., Brown, K., McEwan, M., & Macdonald, R. A. (2022). Exploring approaches to community music delivery by practitioners with and without additional support needs: A qualitative study. international journal of community music, 15(3), 385-403. Available from https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/330171427/Macglone2022IJCMCMDelivery.pdf
McAuliffe, L. (2018). Inclusion for All? In T. G. K. Bryce, W. M. Humes, D. Gillies, A. Kennedy, T. Bryce, J. Davidson, D. Gillies, T. Hamilton, G. Head, W. Humes, A. Kennedy, & I. Smith (Eds.), Scottish Education: Fifth Edition (pp. 697–706). Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kz4g7s.80
Murdoch, D., English, A.R., Hintz, A. and Tyson, K., 2020. Feeling heard: Inclusive education, transformative learning, and productive struggle. Educational Theory, 70(5), pp.653-679.