Creativity In Teaching

These teachers had varying musical notation learning experiences. David found learning musical notation to be “quite complicated” because teachers assumed the class had the required previous related knowledge. Three teachers said they were not taught how to sight-read in primary: they were given the letter names of notes instead when learning songs on instruments. Tony revealed this negatively impacted his learning as he had to “re-learn how to read music” for Junior Certificate music. Given the 1971 curriculum (Oideachas, 1971) only provided sight-reading teaching guidance for song-singing by using tonic sol-fa, I can see why many pupils never learned how to sight-read when playing instruments. This provides some insight into why high levels of music illiteracy were found in primary school graduates in the 1980’s per Herron’s findings (1985). Even when teaching notation now, one teacher noted having issues: saying her “not being musical” is the reason as she “wouldn’t be very interested in learning it” if she didn’t have to teach

Two teachers felt their teachers were “old-fashioned” who preferred “drill-learning” teaching approaches and thus did not exhibit a positive attitude towards music. At one point, however, one teacher had an enthusiastic specialist Arts teacher, from whom she cited influencing her attitude towards teaching music: “Just her enthusiasm, I really picked it up from her.” Birch’s (1969) idea that teachers pass on their subject attitudes to their pupils is coming into play here. But this seems to be only true in relation to positive attitudes in this study. Negative attitudes of their former “old-fashioned” teachers did not transfer to their teaching: again, Mezirow’s (2000) perspective on transformative learning theory coming into play as assimilated negative attitudes towards music can be successfully critically challenged and