Examining a student experience in making music inside and outside of school

Abstract

Many students participate in multiple music-making cultures whether it’s at home or in school. To better understand the relationship between home and school music-making cultures, the purpose of this study was to explore how a student’s informal music-making outside of school and nontraditional music classroom experience intersects. Ricky, a high school musician, was the participant in this study. The participant was observed in both his home and school music-making culture and was interviewed three times. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews, and observations in the respective music-making cultures. Findings included the cultural norms in the two music-making cultures such as notation, assessment/feedback, and creating, the influences that two spaces had on each other specifically how he learns lessons at school that he takes home and how he plays songs from his home culture at school, and recommendations from the participant like incorporating more genres and styles at school. Conclusions from this study provide implications for music educators who wish to better serve their students and offers suggestions for future research.