OU Music Well Represented at International Congress for Qualitative Research

OU Music was well represented at the recent International Congress for Qualitative Research held at the University of Illinois May 16-19. The conference brings together qualitative researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, education, and health sciences. This year’s congress included a Day of the Arts that took place on May 16th. OU music education faculty and graduate students were invited to share their work on this Day of the Arts that showcased qualitative research in arts education.

Deborah Blair, Associate Professor of Music Education, presented her research along with colleagues Jeananne Nichols, University of Illinois, and Sandra Stauffer, Arizona State University. Their joint presentation was entitled, “Narratives of Music and Learning: Persons, Places, and Practices.” Dr. Blair’s presentation was “School From the Child’s Eyes: Narrative Construction as Reflective Practice.” The three researchers plan to craft their ideas into a collaborative paper that will be submitted for publication.

Five representatives of the music education doctoral program co-presented a session as well. The session was called, “Mentoring Research in an Arts-infused Community.” Jackie Wiggins, Professor of Music Education and coordinator of OU’s music education doctoral program, led the session with a short talk about the role of artistic thinking and perspectives in the research of arts education researchers. Subsequently, two current doctoral students and two recent graduates of the program presented their dissertation research. The students’ presentations dealt with their research processes and how their musical thinking and ways of knowing were present in their thinking as researchers.

In his presentation, “Conducting Research or Research as a Conductor,” Jonathan Busch spoke about how the ways he approaches a musical score as a conductor interfaced with and supported the ways he has been approaching his research analysis in his dissertation study. Knowing that each time he approaches a score with an ensemble he sees the music in a new way informed his ways of looking at his research data, helping him understand why he was experiencing a similar phenomenon in his research analysis – that what he finds one day seems to be slightly different the next. Building on what he knows as a musician has enabled him to make better sense of the data he is trying to interpret as a researcher. For those unfamiliar with the kinds of research described here, the data consist of audio- and video-recordings of classroom interactions, in this case, in a secondary band classroom where Jon is the music teacher. The researchers work from the recordings and also from transcriptions of the recordings to interpret and come to understand the core issues that emerge from the situation they are studying.

Shinko Kondo is studying “Musical Communication in Young Beginners’ Piano Learning,” which was also the title of her presentation. Shinko is a Japanese musician and music teacher living and working in the US. As such, she experiences many East/West intersections in her life, having been raised in an Eastern culture studying Western music and now living in the West, teaching Western music to Eastern children who also live in the West. She has become very aware of how her understanding of both Eastern and Western art has influenced her data analysis. In her presentation, she showed the audience photos of Eastern and Western art, explaining the space and silence that is so central to Eastern art – creating places that invite the viewer inside the work to bring his or her own interpretations and understandings to the work. Western art tends to be more complete and full of detail. In approaching her data, Shinko has realized that she is attending to spaces and silences as much as to the words and actions of her study participants. The perspectives she brings will enable her to see and hear more in these data than another researcher might.

Presenting her recently completed dissertation, the new Dr. Phyllis White, who is also a Special Lecturer in Music at OU, spoke about, “Becoming a Virtual Teacher/Researcher in a Virtual Music Learning Environment.” Phyllis studied the nature of students’ learning in two new online courses she has designed and teaches at OU: MUS 225, Song and Songwriting, and MUS 339, What’s On Your Playlist? Aesthetics in Music. Phyllis is also an internationally known composer of choral music. In her conference presentation, she showed the audience how, in the writing of her dissertation, she shared the multiple voices of her participants in much the same way as music is represented on a choral score – that the story was told from the perspectives of the various “voice parts” all telling one story, but each from his or her own perspective. She also briefly shared the findings of her study, Thinking-In-Music-With-Music: Students’ Musical Understanding and Learning in Two Interactive Online Music General Education Courses. Phyllis is in the process of developing a set of articles from her study that she will submit for publication when they are ready to be considered.

Finally, the new Dr. Miroslav Manovski closed the session with a presentation of his dissertation research process entitled, “Finding My Voice: Musical Thinking/Process as Analysis Process in a Qualitative Study.” Miroslav engaged in an autoethnographic, arts-based study of his own processes of becoming a singer: Finding My Voice: [Re]living, [Re]learning, and [Re]searching Becoming a Singer in a Culture of Marginalization. In his work analyzing data reflective of his own life experience, he found himself engaging in a range of artistic processes as part of his thinking. Often, he found that he was improvising at the piano as he thought through the interrelationships among the themes emerging in his analysis process. He realized he was actually using musical thinking – not verbal thinking – to figure out how ideas were interconnected. Sometimes his improvisations involved singing and playing. He would leave the computer keyboard for the piano keyboard and think through his fingers until he knew what he wanted to write. During this analysis process, Miroslav also happened to be working in ceramics and realized that he was often thinking about his data analysis “through his fingers” in the clay as well. The dissertation tells the story through words, image, and music – particularly image. The narrative in the document is interlaced with photos, including photos of the ceramics, musical scores, and photos of Miroslav’s own face made up with stage make-up expressing the ideas portrayed in the text. Miroslav’s conference presentation included a video comprised of some of the photos and his own live piano improvisations as he explained his process.

In addition to all the OU Music presenters, Andrea Eis, Associate Professor of Art, was one of the keynotes at the Day of the Arts. She presented her OU Presidential Colloquium presentation, “Conversations with the Silence of the Past: Art and Marginalia. The presentation was wonderfully received and embraced by attendees.

OU Music faculty, students, and alumni had quite a presence at this international conference! Several thousand people attended the conference. This was the first Day of the Arts at this conference. It was highly successful and the organizers expect to make it a permanent part of this annual conference. The conference sessions and workshops were tremendously informative. OU music education faculty intend to make participation in this conference a regular part of the educational experience of music education doctoral students. We are most proud of the success of the students and faculty who represented OU this year!