Pamela Burnard - Future Maker

The Cats of Music Education Series

Pamela Burnard is a Cat of Music Education. Her journey is important to us for many reasons. Here is a selection:

1. She is Australian

2. She embodies passion for music(s) and music(s) education

3. She is subversive

4. She is courageously outspoken

5. She is Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, University of Cambridge, UK

6. She’s Adjunct Professor with the School of Humanities and Communication Arts of Western Sydney University, Australia

Key takeaway - dare to dream Australian subversive classroom music educators!

We’ve been fortunate to be able to spend some time listening to Prof. Burnard riff in real time on a range of classroom music education topics in recent Zoom symposia and conferences and we are so humbled and inspired by her capacity to articulate the most pressing issues in the most accessible manner.

Our featured video is a great example. Professor Burnard breaks down “good” or “effective” music education into three “R’s” and a “C”:

• Research Informed

• Relevant

• Real World

• - that puts diverse creativities at the heart

We find we have to stand up to watch videos like these - like Professor Burnard “We do get excited about this”.

The 3RC is at the core of our Gig Based Learning approach to classroom music education. 4 letters for us to keep in front of mind, keeping it simple, as it gives us a road map to direct our research-informed practice. Try putting a question mark after each one and it will transform your classroom: Is our music classroom:

• Research Informed?

• Relevant?

• Real World?

• Creative?

See? Changes everything right? What a wonderful challenge to shape our professional lives!

So, once you’ve watched the feature video, be challenged to reflect on your “smuggled in assumptions” about creativity in the video below from the Media Journal in Music Education. That should inspire you to begin reading.

MJiME Video: Researching Musical Creativities in Practice

Book: Musical Creativities in Practice

Book: Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Education (with Ylva Hofvander Trulsson)

Journal Article: Burnard, P. (2012) Rethinking creative teaching and teaching as research: Mapping the critical phases that mark times of change and choosing as learners and teachers of music.

And keep an eye out for:

Burnard, P. (2022 in production) A Posthumanist Theory of Multiple Creativities: Moving Beyond Defining by Pluralising. The Netherlands: Brill-I-Sense Publishers.

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Ways to work together?

1. Interested in making GarageBand for iPad work for you in your classroom? Get the Make Hot Hits with GarageBand for iPad course for FREE.

2. Interested how we dig deeper about our ideas around music theory in the Gig Based Classroom™? Check out our FREE GBL Music Theory Course. It contains all of our YouTube music theory video’s, but in sequential order, inside a canvas course.

3. Want to get to know me further? I stimulate discussions (we call it “The Weekly Riff”) on music education philosophy, pedagogy, technology and content inside our FREE community. Join my colleague, Pete Orenstein, in our Community of Practice aka the GBL CoP 👮🚨🚓🚨👮

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter

I also read every comment on our YouTube. So, see you there.

Dr Brad Fuller