Whose music education is it anyway? Musical Futures: By young people for young people

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Musical Futures is a student-centred approach to music learning and teaching which originally developed from and is most commonly found in music classrooms in schools across the world.

However in addition to our recent work with instrumental teachers in China, where we have been exploring the relevance of Musical Futures in instrumental learning, in the UK the Disquiet project has also looked outside the classroom. Disquiet explores whether accessible teaching methods, such as Musical Futures: Just Play and instructional YouTube videos, could be adapted to effectively support music sessions for 13-15 year olds. 

The Disquiet pilot project worked with six trainee music leaders aged 16-19 at both Strood Youth Centre and Ideas Test in Sittingbourne in the UK and the two focus areas explored firstly what training might be required for young people to lead workshops with younger peers and whether the current Musical Futures resources originally designed for use by teachers in classrooms would be appropriate in these new settings. 

Disquiet was supported by funding from Youth Music. Kent Music kindly continued to facilitate the project at Ideas Test, Sittingbourne, beyond the funding period. The pilot was managed by SparkedEcho on behalf of Musical Futures UK

5 Tips for setting up songwriting workshops led by young people for young people

A reflective piece written by SparkedEcho Director Kevin Grist can be found here and the full write up is well worth a read for anyone interested in learning more about keeping student choice and voice at the heart of their music program. 

Here at Musical Futures International, we are keen to keep learners/students/young people at the very heart of their music education. The mix of formal and non formal/informal approaches that Musical Futures advocates should always be driven by the needs, wants and existing passions for music of those at the receiving end of their own music education.

We were particularly interested in what the young people had to say about the Musical Futures: Just Play resources and how young people used these in combination other openly-available resources such as those found on Youtube or similar to teach themselves and others. We love the idea of how these were blended to create what Kevin describes as "a youth-led adaptation" of Musical Futures.

There are also some interesting implications for teachers allowing students to incorporate open-source resources into informal learning in terms of the support they might need to find the most useful content to achieve the musical outcomes they set for themselves. Kevin identifies issues with quality, usefulness, licensing and more as potential issues for students to navigate through.

The young people were then able to create their own resources and the videos below are a great example of what they produced themselves in response to some of the challenges they faced. 

It would be great to see the kinds of resources students in our Musical Futures International communities might produce if they were given similar ownership over their learning and invited to pass that learning on through peer to peer music activities both in school or in other settings. 

We would also love to know what students make of the video resources produced by the young people involved in the pilots which can be found below.

Please do read the full write up of the project on the Musical Futures UK website by clicking here and you can leave any comments or feedback at the bottom of this post. 

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