Department of Music

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Browsing Department of Music by Subject "21st century -- Musical competence"

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    Future-focussed music education: developing 21st-century competencies in a South African middle school music classroom
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-04) Mullins, Angela Catherine; Lucia, Christine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Educators world-wide find themselves in the challenging position of educating young adolescents for a future in which exponential knowledge doubling will become a reality. Together with the medical prognosis of a much longer life span for this age group and a radical restructuring of the global economy, the implication is that today’s youth will need the skills to negotiate a much longer career of self-employment through a succession of jobs, often collaborative in nature and mostly Internet-driven. These factors have triggered a shift, worldwide, from a knowledge-based school curriculum to a competency-based curriculum. Using a constructivist and humanistic theoretical framework, this dissertation explores the impact that a competency-based music curriculum could make in the development of the 21st-century competencies that students will need to thrive in the workplace of the future. It also investigates which pedagogical methods could be most effective in developing these competencies, what types of feedback students might find most effective, how an explicit focus on 21st-century competencies can assist students in their development of these skills, and which of the competencies developed through music can be transferred into other learning areas. An extensive literature review that identified the most pertinent set of 21st-century competencies is followed by a detailed description and evaluation of a teacher-based case study I conducted in a Johannesburg private school music class consisting of 23 students aged 12-13 years. I designed a year-long class music course using L Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning (2003) and collected data through rubric-based observations, student self-assessments, and focus groups. This data, collected over four research cycles and a final assessment, was collated into competency profile maps that illustrate the growth and development of the competencies. The main finding is that an explicit focus on 21st-century competencies in a music curriculum, in conjunction with the pedagogical methods of project-based learning, gamification, and blended learning, have an uneven but positive impact on students’ development of these competencies. A secondary finding is that such competency development through music can be adapted to other subjects, schools and locations. In an age of Covid-19, another significant finding is that teaching and assessment that is heavily Internet-based can be no less successful in music than in any traditional ‘academic’ subject.