Creativity and Music Teaching with Dr. Viv John

Dr. Viv John, recently awarded her doctorate after completing the Cardiff Met EdD programme with flying colours, has been in our sights for a while! After hearing the rave reviews of her viva, we had to get her in front of a microphone to find out what she's been researching.

And the answer is that Dr. Viv has been bravely tackling several of the trickier areas relating to music education, taking on so many challenges that even her supervisors wondered if it was wise!

In a nutshell, Viv was interested in trying to nail down the tricky concept of creativity as it applies to musicians who embark on the PGCE in secondary music with the aim of becoming classroom music teachers. We've heard many times on the podcast from Tom about the fact that people entering the profession as secondary music teachers skew strongly towards what we call 'classically trained', and Viv was interested in the implications of that for how these musicians see their own creativity and how it changes as they beome teachers. As well as the PGCE students trained in the western classical tradition, a small group of non classically-trained musicians came onto the programme and Viv was able to see how their views of creativity differed, and the challenges that they faced when entering a profession that has largely trained in music in a very different way.

Along the road to gaining her EdD, Viv grappled with the sociological theories of Pierre Bordieu as a means of making sense of what was going on, and used the slightly unorthodox research methodology of narrative enquiry to tell the stories of these musicians as they entered the teaching profession during their PGCE year.

This episode will be a gift to anyone interested in music education, arts education, creativity, the sociology of education and narrative enquiry, so our grateful thanks to Viv for popping in just before Christmas to bring us such a huge selection of goodies!

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Recorded in studio D0.12 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 14th December 2021