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Summary (Abstract)

This report presents a three-year Centre of Excellence in Music Performance Education (CEMPE) development project titled ‘Integrated Practice’. The report surveys the participating teachers’ and students’ experiences and learning outcomes after teaching and learning their main instrument in an environment that included group tuition and the use of the Alexander technique. The report teases out some of the complexities of main-instrument tuition as viewed from the students’ and teachers’ perspectives; the report also discusses challenges to the assumption of an all-knowing instrument teacher as well as common music-education conceptualisations of the body. The argument presented in this report is that by addressing these issues, a richer and more supportive learning environment can be created for students, with the added benefits of supporting teachers’ professional development and decreasing the problem of studio isolation. A transformation in the way project’s participants thought about their discipline can be traced in the project’s findings, a process which unfolded over time. The temporal dimension of learning is important to acknowledge when designing learning environments to provide the necessary support for the unfolding learning process. The project has resulted in an integrative and collaborative tuition model that promotes the emergence of shared practices, which in turn has several implications for curriculum development. The report concludes with suggestions for further research.

Neste Introduction to the project and its structure