Garage Rock Bands: A Future Model For Developing Musical Expertise?

After reading the article, “ Garage rock bands: a future model for developing musical expertise?” by Heidi Westerlund, I found it very informative to see the reasoning behind why the author believes the use of rock music can facilitate more culturally appropriate and useful educational techniques.

         The first thing that caught my eye in the article was the Introduction.  Westerlund claims that Finnish music education is more welcoming to Afro-American-based popular music than the United States.  As educators, should we not want to address every possible cultures’ music, especially when the United States has a predominant amount of African-Americans?  What injustice do we provide to this particular culture in a typical music education class within the United States? According to the article, in Finnish schools, they utilize microphones, drums, electric bass, and electric guitars, regardless of whether the actual curriculum specifies their use.  They also include nationally recognized popular musicians in their teacher training.  However, Westerlund goes on to say that despite the use of pop culture in Finnish schools and music education, there isn’t much research on how their learning and teaching is being affected.  In the remainder of the article, the author discusses the apprenticeship tradition and learning environments and conditions of change in hopes of providing enough basic information to continue one’s research in this area.

         In the next section, “The apprenticeship tradition”, the author explains how this particular tradition works.  According to this tradition, a student’s acquisition of skills takes place through modeling, demonstration, imitation and application.  The adult teacher of the apprentice is the initiator and verifier of the activity, making this tradition based on control.  In my opinion, I feel as the apprenticeship tradition is a beneficial technique, however, I think it lacks the ability to add your own individual ideas to the table.  As stated by the author, “ Even if this is a commonly accepted and presumably effective model in education, researchers into this kind of expertise, such as Bereiter and Scardamalia, claim that the traditional apprenticeship model does not necessarily lead to a creative expert culture.”  This statement to me explains why the Finnish schools are incorporating popular music into their music education classes, in hopes of fostering creativity and individuality. 

         Westerlund then moves on to discuss and analyze learning environments and change.  In this section, the author mentions Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) again in response to the key features of environments where expertise is supported and developed stating, “therefore focus on knowledge-building communities in which peer-directed learning and group learning are characteristic features.  Teamwork becomes an important component of creating knowledge-building communities.  The expert team does not just do its work well, it gets somewhere.”  This particular quotation parallels the examples of peer-directed learning from Lucy Green’s book, “ Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy,” in which groups of students are allowed to pick their own music and learn it without the teacher’s input.  Not surprisingly, Green reported how the students appeared more motivated and eager to learn.  It seems obvious to me that when students work together in a supportive environment, they develop what’s referred to as a ‘collective expertise’ that is separate from the knowledge that individual students posses. 

         Although this article skimmed over the basics of music education in classrooms today, I feel as if the author proposed ideas that encourage further research into the benefits of incorporating popular music into our music education classrooms.  Personally, I feel that there is a variety of benefits associated with the use of peer-directed learning and popular music in today’s classrooms.  Adding more motivational activities to the curriculum can only make it more successful.