Instrumental and Classroom Music Education: Towards an Integrated Music Curriculum

Instrumental and classroom music teachers have been delivering a music curriculum that runs parallel and rarely intersects. Much instrumental teaching occurs in complete isolation from classroom activities. This research will investigate the relationship and attitudes of instrumental and classroom music pedagogues towards an integrated music curriculum. The project aims to bring together the two strands and challenge music educators to view their students' musical development in a fundamentally different way. It is recognised that instrumental and classroom music curriculum each offer similar but different aspects of music education. However, an integrated approach represents how their dual functions in music curriculum are mutually supportive. It is the purpose of this research to investigate current practice and attitudes of instrumental and classroom music teachers towards an integrated music curriculum in Perth, Western Australia. To this end, both classroom and instrumental teachers will complete a questionnaire regarding their attitudes towards the value of a more coherent and integrated music curriculum. Further data will be collected through interviews. Based on the results of the data, a later stage of the research is the consideration of the implications for practice in the value and development of integrated music curricular.