Musical co-creativity and learning in the Kokas pedagogy : polyphony of movement and imagination

The study reported here is part of a research collaboration with the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy of Music. Our research centres around the Kokas pedagogy, an experiential approach to music education combining music, movement and reflection. The paper contributes the Higher Education research strand, unpacking the relevance of this pedagogy in the context of music teacher education. Returning to the phenomenological roots of dialogicality (Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Buber and Gregory Smith, 1958) and drawing on the key principles of Natural Inclusionality (Rayner, 2017) it investigates the nature and value of the embodied musical learning and co-creativity in this context. My aim was to capture the participants’ imaginative re-opening to self and world, expressed through i) synchrony between movement and music, ii) other-orientation, and iii) creative attunement, evolving from the former two. Using video recordings of the focal cohort (9 3-hour sessions with 10 students) and students’ self-reflective compositions, the study involved the qualitative analysis of action (movement data) and reflection. The analytic process combined the researcher’s inner and outer perception in exploring the nature of the phenomena in focus. The findings captured the infinitude of dialogic connectivity in the focal student cohort. The deep cohesion was largely experience-generated, whereby the participants’ awareness was gradually brought back to natural continuity through a fluid, mutually receptive-responsive bodily dialogue. This signifies learning which reaches beyond the knowledge and praxis of intellectually constituted thought and language. The musical encounters proved to be the fountain of new, creative forms of perceiving, knowing and relating in the observed HE setting