Examining informal and formal music learning approaches in school music education
Exploring research methodology
Every research project relies on a methodology and associated methods that reflect the researcher's own beliefs and background. These underpinning assumptions, often left unstated, form the central topic of this paper. This critical reflection traces an early career researcher's investigation into how informal and formal music pedagogy come together in secondary school classrooms. The paper examines what shaped the researcher's methodological choices and how those choices affected the methods selected. It also reviews key studies in informal music learning, with special attention to revealing the methodological orientations those studies carry.
Key words
informal music pedagogy, research design process
Reflecting on engagement
This paper reflects on my personal journey as an early career researcher working through a research design process. The journey has not moved in a straight line but rather followed a hermeneutic path, looping through cycles of dialogue and iteration. It has also demanded a careful look at the underlying beliefs and methodologies present in the major studies that influenced my research choices. Every study is shaped by the researcher's position, and this paper makes that decision-making path clear, acknowledging the intricate layers and interconnections that run through music education research on formal and informal pedagogies.
My own music education has included many different encounters with both formal and informal approaches. As a clarinet player trained mostly in Western art music, I learned primarily through notation. It was only after I began teaching music at a government secondary school on the outskirts of Melbourne that I engaged with a wider range of popular and intercultural music.
Once I started teaching, I quickly realised that creative music-making ideas drawn from contemporary art music were not going to hold the attention of Year eight students. They wanted to play, make, and listen to music that felt like theirs. The content of my formal training, centered on Western art music, and the processes, mostly based on notation, held little appeal for most of my students. This forced me into an ongoing process of learning and adapting my teaching. For instance, when I taught in the UK, students could take GCSE Music at age sixteen without having instrumental lessons. This meant I often taught drummers and guitarists who barely read notation. Recording or sequencing compositions with technology made far more sense than using notation. Over time, the amount of class time I gave to Western art music shrank while the focus on popular and intercultural music grew. This teaching experience changed my own musicianship too, leading me to play piano and other woodwind instruments and take lessons in contemporary popular singing.
Learning new instruments and musical genres often meant a lot of trial and error, self-teaching, and learning alongside colleagues. I frequently tried to learn intercultural and popular musics by applying the same Western art music learning methods I had grown up with. Then I came across Lucy Green's work describing how popular musicians learn informally and suggesting how those methods might be used in the classroom. That was a transformative moment. For me, informal music learning pedagogy marks a shift from treating music as content to be studied toward a real-world pedagogy, what some call an ethnopedagogy. It is an approach to all styles of music that gives students more say in their own musical learning.
My orientation toward informal pedagogy is clear from the wide range of jazz and popular music I listen to and have tried playing by ear. In my experience, informal and formal approaches are always present together, and our ingrained habit of favoring formal experiences runs deep. My musical and professional background has driven me to investigate more effective ways of learning and teaching music, grounded in a better understanding of how informal and formal approaches connect, and that is the core of my study.
Inspired by Lucy Green: seeking to know more
This brief overview of the literature on informal music learning pedagogy sets my research in context and introduces the reader to the field. Research on informal music learning in classrooms emerged from the UK through Lucy Green's work in 2002. Although popular music has been included in school music curricula since the 1970s, Green pointed out that schools had mostly ignored the real-world learning processes popular musicians typically use. Green's work subsequently led to the Musical Futures pedagogical approach, first piloted in Victoria in 2010. A key goal of Musical Futures is to make classroom music more meaningful for students by connecting to their musical lives outside school. Evaluations of Musical Futures have found that informal music learning practices strongly engage students and help them acquire musical skills and knowledge.
Green saw informal music learning as a complement to formal approaches, not a substitute. Much of the literature argues that it is necessary to integrate the two approaches rather than replace one with the other. Formal and informal instruction are not a clear-cut dichotomy. Both are present in most situations and they support each other. Yet despite calls for research into the intersection of these pedagogies, this complex dialogue has not been clearly explained.
My teaching experience sparked a desire to systematically investigate formal and informal orientations to pedagogy. Understanding more deeply how informal music learning works in practice and how it is integrated with formal approaches could help music educators improve future learning and teaching.
Where am I coming from?
Placing the research focus and the researcher's background in context clarifies my methodological choices. My experience aligns with a constructivist belief that individuals construct realities based on context-dependent social experiences. These constructions are not fixed; they can change as the social context shifts. A constructivist stance fits naturally with informal music learning pedagogy, which is co-constructed between teacher and student and welcomes outside musical worlds and culture into formal educational spaces. Constructivism supports a postmodern viewpoint, interpretive knowledge, and a relativist approach to musical genres that does not treat the Western art-music canon as inherently superior. A constructivist view sees teachers and students building knowledge together. For example, both might act as composers, creating music by drawing on their prior knowledge and experiences. Process naturally matters more than product. This lack of hierarchy in relationships between co-creators matches the informal processes by which popular music is learned, either in peer groups or alone, rather than through an expert-novice relationship.
Four key studies of informal music learning have helped me think about my own orientation. All four researchers come from Western art-music backgrounds like mine, except for one who has performed professionally with both classical and popular musicians. Two of them state explicitly that they align with a constructivist viewpoint. Another comes from a Western art-music background and does not state an underlying position clearly, but her in-depth descriptive research and references to ethnomusicological studies point toward a constructivist perspective using an ethnographic approach. Still another takes a critical perspective. One researcher does not state her position explicitly, but she draws heavily on socio-cultural theory, which could be read as constructivist.
The range of contexts and foci these researchers chose is revealing. All studied informal music learning, but only one of them worked entirely in school classrooms. Others investigated higher education in Brazil, informal learning inside and outside classrooms across both primary and secondary ages, and informal learning at a festival. All of them, in one way or another, look at musical culture in relation to informal music learning, but they take a broad and inclusive view of what counts as learning. This matches informal learning, whose processes arise outside formal education, and constructivism, which sees knowledge as derived from experience and constructed by participants in context rather than transmitted by an expert.
Exploring methodology
Taking my research focus, philosophical orientation, and the studies that resonated with me into account, I have chosen ethnography as my methodology. Ethnography is both a process and a product that seeks to describe culture. The goal is for the ethnographer to share in the meanings cultural participants take for granted and then to present fresh understandings to readers and outsiders. Major informal music learning studies, including several that also used ethnography, have helped me build my methodology and methods.
A defining feature of ethnography is prolonged time spent in the field to achieve deep understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. This lengthy engagement allows collaborative dialogical relationships with participants, who can become co-researchers. My constructivist orientation, which calls for multi-vocal representation, is well served by an ethnographic approach. This matters from the perspective of informal music learning, which aims to dissolve the hierarchies between Western art music and popular music and to challenge who controls the direction of learning, the teacher or the student. Ethnographic methods allow a deep focus on the researcher-participant relationship.
I have also drawn on ethnomusicology to inform both my methodology and methods. Like ethnography, ethnomusicology aims to describe musical phenomena in the cultural context where they occur. Ethnomusicology also connects with informal music learning because it recognizes that the real-world transmission methods of popular music are integral to the music itself, and it focuses on process as well as product.
One researcher states that ethnomusicology influenced her study and uses a rationale arguing that it is appropriate to undertake music education research through ethnomusicological methods and perspectives. Ethnomusicology takes a holistic approach to music-making within its cultural context, where the transmission of music from one setting to another is understood as a cross-cultural phenomenon, an important concept for thinking about pedagogy across cultural boundaries. This is relevant to informal music learning pedagogy because popular music can be seen as the musical culture of students' lives outside school. Informal music learning pedagogy takes the learning processes and content from students' outside musical culture and brings them into the often very different musical culture of the school, in terms of both content and teaching approach.
Other researchers in the field have interpreted the terms 'formal' and 'informal,' and these have been examined through particular lenses in particular contexts. My research will use a different lens and context, and the form of informal music learning I will study reshapes the classroom. Some researchers point out that Green's approach is only one possible version of informal music learning, and others stress how important it is to define terms clearly because they are open to interpretation.
Doing methodology: methods of data collection, analysis, and writing
Choosing ethnography as a methodology has implications for data collection, analysis, and presentation. These choices are discussed here. To construct a portrait of the culture-sharing group, consisting of students and teachers in a school music program, I need to spend considerable time in the field. Participant observation gives firsthand experience over time of how informal music pedagogy is actually applied. From a constructivist viewpoint, data is collected to build a holistic picture, not to discover an objective truth. For that reason, data comes from multiple perspectives using various procedures.
Several other researchers investigating informal music learning collected extensive observation data. There are real challenges to capturing the complexity of a classroom through observation. Therefore, I will use different approaches to collect observation data that picks up on both informal and formal orientations to music pedagogy. First, I will engage in a theory-generating process using open observations. These will form the basis for formative analysis. This method was used by other researchers who video-recorded data and generated observations from it later, and by those who conducted unstructured observation that allowed categories to emerge later. Informed by the themes that come from the open observations and cross-referenced with key themes from the literature, I will then conduct more focused observations that pay careful attention to interactions and conditions considered significant for formal and informal pedagogies. What the literature suggests I might expect to observe may look different in practice.
Simply by being present, I can significantly change what I observe in the classroom, which is a well-known limitation of observation data.
Researcher bias also presents a challenge, since the data relies on my own interpretations and choices about what to include, inevitably leaving out other aspects. Having participants contribute to member-checking during data collection lets them generate and verify observations and interpretations.
Interviews will serve as another central data collection method. They will help provide rich, detailed accounts from participants; build a more complete picture of both informal and formal pedagogical orientations; and follow up on observations while capturing data not accessible through direct observation (Kervin et al., 2006). These interviews will involve semi-structured focus groups and individual interviews (depending on participant preferences) with students and the teacher, as well as informal research conversations.
In an interview context, participants vary in articulateness and perceptiveness, which could privilege the views of those who speak more fluently (Kervin et al., 2006). My relationship with participants may also limit what they feel comfortable sharing. Green (2008) administered quantitative surveys at the end of her project to extend and verify interview data; one reason was to give participants a chance to say things they might have avoided in an interview setting. Additional data will come from documents such as curriculum materials, policies, and teachers’ planning. All data collection choices carry limitations, so data will be gathered from diverse sources and procedures while maintaining reflexivity throughout the process. The site selection necessarily shapes choices about data collection methods based on what is feasible and desirable.
An ethnographic approach has implications for data analysis and presentation. I plan to undertake thematic analysis as a way to condense and reduce the large volume of data, identifying essential features or themes (Creswell, 2007). As a constructivist and ethnographic researcher, writing reflexively and acknowledging how my background influences my perception and shaping of data will be crucial for constructing the analysis (Creswell, 2007). I aim to represent the culture-sharing group’s patterns of behaviour, and for this to resonate with readers outside the setting, thick description is essential (Creswell, 2007).
The research design process appears here as a sequential narrative, but in reality there has been considerable back-and-forth across different elements in a dialogical process. Making decisions has required weighing each choice’s impact against other related aspects. For example, considering data collection methods compelled me to revisit the research focus, clarify exactly what I was looking for, and assess how helpful those methods would be. The central argument of this paper is that research design decisions involve a complex, iterative process; identifying and articulating the inherent elements reminds us of the fundamental complexities and interrelationships.