Facilitating Teacher -Student Collaboration and Student Decision -Making Opportunities in the Music Classroom: An Action Research Study

266 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.Although a body of theoretical and research literature supports incorporating student interest and autonomy into instruction, teachers are challenged in the application of those principles to the elementary general music classroom. Acknowledging that general music class may be many students' only formal or final opportunity to develop musical understanding places significant responsibility on general music teachers to engage them in the learning process. This study documents a general music teacher/researcher's effort to collaborate with 22 fifth-grade students in developing learning activities that address state/national learning standards and the impact on student's disposition toward learning over the course of 18 class sessions. Project-based activities within small cooperative learning groups emerged as a result of student/teacher collaboration, each group presenting two projects. Data was collected in a variety of forms: video recordings that were later transcribed, field notes, student work, student interviews, teaching journal, two student surveys, and artifacts of student work. Several issues emerging from the process are discussed within the organization of four primary themes: (a) power relationships within the classroom, (b) developing student autonomy, (c) goal setting and learning goals, and (d) fostering intentional learning and intrinsic motivation. The researcher takes care to note that any conclusions must be interpreted within the recognition that improving his own practice takes precedence over generating knowledge that may or may not be generalized to a larger population. Findings point out the challenges and rewards of applying social-constructivist principles to the music classroom and the need for more research on critical thinking, cooperative learning, and the affective domain within actual practice of teaching elementary general music.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD