Maybe it shouldn't be easy to assess music ensemble classes
Why I am critical of individual music assessments for ensemble classes
In an effort to improve my writing and scholarship, I have decided to put my thoughts on music education onto Substack. Much of my interest in a more social form of scholarship has been from reading Gert Biesta’s books and journal articles. His ideas of teaching and learning, specifically his discussion on the purpose of education, have been enlightening.
It is disheartening to see the unquestioning enthusiasm of many teachers for the top-down educational reforms that have infiltrated public education. There always seems to be a misunderstanding by teachers that the language that administrators and reformers use toward education is not neutral. We have lost the forest in the trees for the purpose of education, and nobody will help save teachers from it besides teachers. Educational reformers are more than happy to continue to individualize learning, eliminate schools, and reduce the value of teachers to, at best, “facilitators of learning.” The purpose of education is a difficult concept to articulate, and I am not diving into what I think the purpose of education is in this post…but I will state that, similar to Biesta, I do not believe it is found within the “language of learning.”
Biesta frequently comments against the “learnification” of modern education (see Biesta, 2013). In his view, learning has become an individual endeavor and generally covers only one of the three domains he delineates for education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Qualification and socialization are relatively easy to understand without much definition, but subjectification is an odd term. Biesta plays with two meanings of the word subject within the word subjectification: one being that students are becoming a subject, rather than an object to be manipulated by teachers; also that students are subjected to ideas and environments outside of themselves in schools. Learning skills would generally fall under qualification, and entirely leave out socialization and subjectification.
In this world of top-down mandates, I tend to hear the question from administrators, “what do you want your students to know?” While this is a seemingly unproblematic statement, it is not a neutral statement. For music ensemble teachers, the emphasis is completely placed on student knowledge rather than the ensemble experience, and this statement is frequently followed with “how will you assess their knowledge?” As a band teacher, this is a problematic phrase. For any piece that we perform with our students, there are any number of possible individual skills to pull out and assess. I could do what some teachers in mandatory assessment districts have done and create a separate curriculum of standardized skills for each student that is unrelated to the ensemble music. What is the purpose of these standardized skills? The purpose is to assess, obtain data, and compare that data against other data. Will it help? Maybe… maybe not. Is it the reduction of an ensemble experience to individual learning? Yes.
I want to be clear that I am not advocating for the authoritarian music ensemble experience in which many have participated (see Allsup & Benedict, 2008). But, I am advocating for music teachers to understand that we teach ensemble classes, and that it is good that we teach ensemble classes. It is good that they are difficult to assess without grading participation because participation is one of the most important aspects of performing with an ensemble. An ensemble that is missing members or has members who do not play generally has a tough time.
It is ok that these are difficult to assess, and just because policymakers and administrators think it should be assessed via individual skills, doesn’t mean it actually should be assessed via individual skills. Now, for many folks, this is a losing battle…but if we are going to actually advocate for our programs, shouldn’t we advocate for ensemble classes that actually resemble the interesting and participatory aspects of education that draw students to our courses rather than the incessant and useless testing that has pervaded the profession? Maybe we should talk more about why assessing individuals within ensembles is problematic and how to advocate against it, rather than assuming we are destined to assess individual student learning within an ensemble setting for the rest of our careers.
Allsup, R. E., & Benedict, C. (2008). The problems of band: An inquiry into the future of instrumental music education. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 16(2), 156–173. https://doi.org/10.2979/pme.2008.16.2.156
Biesta, G. J. J. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=4185950