This report presents the project ‘Integrated Practice’, which explored the organisation of main-instrument tuition within performance degree studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music / Norges musikkhøgskole (NMH). The Integrated Practice project merged and further developed two Centre of Excellence in Music Performance Education (CEMPE) projects: the first, led by Jørgensen and documented in his report (Jørgensen, 2015), looked at the potential benefits of linking teaching of the main instrument and the Alexander technique (henceforth ‘AT’) more closely. The second, led by Hanken and documented in her report (Hanken, 2016), investigated complementing one-to-one instrumental tuition with group work. Starting in 2015, a team of main-instrument teachers gradually adopted an integrated setup that combined these two strands in their teaching. By the project’s completion (in May 2018), a total of ten main-instrument teachers and around sixty students had participated.

The main motivation to follow up on Jørgensen’s project (2015) was a shared belief among the initial group of teachers that the AT and close collaboration between the teachers had several potentially important implications on the way we teach music performance more generally. Organising parts of tuition in small groups provided a helpful arena in order to expand upon observation and reflection. While the approach clearly had a positive impact on the students’ playing, many questions remained unanswered by these initial projects. These questions included:

• How could the impact of the integrated approach on student playing (and learning more generally) be characterised?
• How does the approach fit into the day-to-day teaching practices of individual teachers and established traditions?
• How could this positive impact be made more sustainable, both for students and the institution?
• Do teachers need to expand their skill-set to include the AT, or does the presence of a teacher of another discipline explain the difference in learning outcomes in some way?
• What is it about the AT that seems to provide tools for issues that appear important yet unaddressed by current teaching practices and curricula in general?
• Is the approach only suited to the needs and preferences of a few individual teachers and students, or is it relevant on a larger scale?

The exploration of these questions appeared to be immediately relevant to our teaching practices, and it seemed unfortunate to stop at a point where the project would have had only cursory impact. A particular focus of the follow-up project was on increasing the scale of the inquiry. Jørgensen’s project (2015) had a limited number of students, and we wanted to gain a better understanding of how a larger and more diverse student body (in terms of year of study, background, and skill level) would respond to an integrated main-instrument study setup. Because of the possibility that Jørgensen’s project (2015) may have been successful due to the initial group of teachers being outliers in their positive attitude towards the AT approach, an investigation across a broader population of teachers was thought to be important to increase the validity of the findings.

The current project was executed in three iterations, each lasting one academic year, between 2015 and 2018. In the first part of the project, a learning environment was designed around the main-instrument study that included group work and work with the AT. The key characteristics of this environment included (1) an expanding notion of main-subject teaching that went beyond one-to-one instruction, (2) the embedding of a supporting discipline, with the aim of highlighting that discipline’s pertinence to the main-instrument study, and (3) collaborative teaching and learning settings that would foster dialogue and the development of a shared discourse and would encourage active sense-making processes by providing an arena for a shared understanding to evolve.

Each year, a cohort of students was offered the chance to study their main instrument based on a teaching model with the following adjustments compared to the traditional one-to-one teaching scenario:

• a number of individual AT lessons for the students as a part of their main-instrument study;

• a group-work setting where the teachers of both disciplines would work together with a small group of students (three to four per group); the students were encouraged to actively engage in observation, commentary, and discussions; and

• optional AT lessons for the main-instrument teachers.

Essentially the same model for organising teaching activities was used in each of the three iterations, with slight variations in teaching time due to the varying levels of resources available.

While the teaching activities remained essentially the same, the project’s research focus shifted somewhat with each new iteration. Iteration 1 was characterised by its focus on (1) employing the AT as a method for the development of breathing skills and (2) exploring the ways that the main-instrument and the AT teachers could work together, both inside and outside the group sessions. Since a whole instrumental class was involved, the synergies that developed between peers observing each other and engaging in discussions were interesting to explore. Individual differences among the students and their learning became clearer, since there were now more students to compare. For example, some students seemed to learn and understand how the AT was relevant to their instrumental playing more quickly than others. In addition, many students’ pre-assumptions about playing came to the fore as they worked with the AT.

The focus on the development of breathing was abandoned quite early in the project, since the implications of organising the tuition in such a way exceeded such a narrow focus. Thus, in Iteration 2 we wanted to survey and explore the variety of implications and learning outcomes.

While each teacher had the same guidelines on how to implement the model into their practice, and they each had the same resources available, in Iteration 2 the teachers implemented the model in different ways to suit their own practice. They tweaked their implementations by exchanging best practices of what worked and what did not among themselves. For example, the project experimented with the size of the group, the balance of teacher versus student utterances in the group sessions, and the way feedback was provided. These parameters affected the group dynamics, which seemed to be an important aspect of the model’s effectiveness. Each studio had slightly different needs, given the different personalities and the varying ways in which the practices had been structured before the project.

The teachers who participated in Iteration 2 reported that organising their practices in this way contributed to the development of their teaching. Thus, in Iteration 3, the perspectives of as many different teachers as possible were gathered to investigate whether the impressions gleaned from Iteration 2 might be relevant more broadly. Since some of the students had been involved in more than one iteration, Iterations 2 and 3 were used to look at how student learning had unfolded over an extended period of time.

To make Iteration 3 more manageable, the iteration was divided into two parts, each lasting one semester, although this turned out to be an overly short time frame to fully engage with the setup; the first group of teachers used most of the second semester to finish their assigned quota of individual and group sessions. Iteration 3 also offered students an opportunity to take an introductory online course on the AT that had been designed specifically for the project. The course was delivered through Canvas LMS.

The primary aim of this report is to explore the project participants’ perspectives (i.e. those of teachers and students) on engaging with teaching/learning a main instrument within an environment with the aforementioned characteristics. The project raised several questions:

• What are the potential benefits and challenges to the students?
• How do the teachers employ these principles in their own practices?
• What are the benefits and challenges for the teachers?
• What are the implications for pedagogy in general?

We hope that illuminating these questions will contribute to the development of discourse within the discipline of music performance (e.g. the way we see, think, and speak) based on the findings of this exploration. We believe that a more integrated understanding will be beneficial to the practitioners of the discipline, and that such an understanding can become available through collaboration and interaction.

The primary research question of the report is, ‘How do teachers and students experience participating in the project, and how do they interpret and characterise their learning?’