The other thing that made the end of the year busy was completing (with Shirlee Emmons and Lisa Popeil) a chapter on solo vocal pedagogy to be published in the new Oxford Handbook of Music Education. This is a terrific undertaking: a comprehensive handbook AND a website.
Then, after my holiday I began a chapter on ‘Singing Teaching as a Profession’, in which I discuss the attributes of an expert teacher and how these apply in the teaching of singing. This chapter will be published in a collection of work by Australian authors, with the provisional title of Perspectives on Teaching Singing: Australian Vocal Pedagogues Sing Their Stories. No sooner had I completed that than I embarked, with Dr Diane Hughes, on another chapter for that book, called ‘Advocating for Change: Interdisciplinary Voice Studies’. Di and I are keen to see interdisciplinary voice studies included in the National School Curriculum – not just singing as part of Music (and that’s vital!), but voice as an integral part of learning and growth in language and personal development, as part of the curriculum in Science, English, Drama, and Personal Health and Development.
VOICE and the MCA
On Sunday, 27 September, and Monday, 28 September I attended the National Assembly of the Music Council of Australia (MCA) in Melbourne. The MCA is a body that brings together the diverse strands of the musical community in Australia. It conducts research, undertakes advocacy, and gets many different bodies to communicate with each other. I wanted to get a better idea of what is happening in school music, community music, music on radio and music on stage. And I particularly wanted to hear what is happening in relation to the arts in the development of the national school curriculum.
That’s where VOICE comes in. Dr Di Hughes (Music, Macquarie University), Dr Anne Power (Education, University of Western Sydney) and I have formed Vocal Ownership in Cross-Curriculum Education (VOICE), a national advocacy group championing the introduction of cross-curricular voice studies in school education. See
http://www.dcms.mq.edu.au/staff/dianehughes/VOICE.html. Development of the national curriculum is proceeding very slowly, but a lot of work is being put into ensuring that music takes its place. Ideally we’d like to see voice not just as singing as part of Music, but also in the subject area of Drama, and as units of work in the learning areas of Science, English, and Health and Physical Education.
