Category Archives: Book Review

The Guided Reader to Teaching and Learning Music

Bit of a plug here (apologies), but I’m really pleased that my new book has been published today. Routledge have done a great job with this and I’m very pleased with the result. You can order it from them. Here’s the info from the publicity:

The Guided Reader to Teaching and Learning Music draws on extracts from the published work of some of the most influential education writers to provide insight, guidance and clarity about key issues affecting Music teachers.

The book brings together key extracts from classic and contemporary writing and contextualises these in both theoretical and practical terms. The extracts are accompanied by a summary of the key ideas and issues raised, questions to promote discussion and reflective practice, and annotated further reading lists to extend thinking.

Taking a thematic approach and including a short introduction to each theme, the chapters cover:

  • Analysing your own work as a music teacher;
  • Concepts of musicality;
  • Notions of musical development and progression;
  • Pedagogies for teaching music musically;
  • Music inside and outside the school;
  • Formal, informal and non-formal approaches to music education;
  • Productive methods of assessment and transition for music education;
  • Creativity and music education;
  • Supporting the gifted and talented in music;
  • Using ICT within music education.

Aimed at trainee and newly qualified teachers including those working towards Masters-level qualifications, as well practicing teachers, this accessible, but critically provocative text will be an essential resource for all teachers that wish to deepen their understanding of Music Education.

Book Review: Technology and the Gendering of Music Education by Victoria Armstrong

This book explores, most successfully, the construction of gendered identities in the music technology classroom. In particular, it explores these identities within the specific activity of musical composition with technology. Whilst I think that Armstrong is wrong to state that the current research literature ‘ignores the socially constructed nature of computers and computer use’ (p.1), she is right to point out that much of the current research literature in the field of music education with technology focuses on issues other than the gendered implications focused on within her book. This book is an important redress to that imbalance. Continue reading