Educating Children Born Into Two Musical Cultures¹

by Jill Scarfe

Introduction

This article is concerned with the provision of music education for children from the British Punjabi Muslim community. Based on research that took place in the reception class² of an inner-city school in the Midlands where the majority of the children were from the British Punjabi Muslim community, it questions the success of various measures to ensure an equitable music education for all pupils regardless of cultural background. And it suggests that some children in British schools do not have an ‘equal opportunity’ to make progress and are not provided with a music education making adequate provision for their needs. 

The school is situated in a very impoverished inner-city area. In 1996 Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspectors reported that the children were failing to reach national standards in music but that, although they found the overall planning for progression inadequate, the teaching was never less than satisfactory. It did not seem logical that children should fail to make progress if the teaching was satisfactory so I offered to investigate the situation as part of my doctoral research. Subsequent research was conducted in the UK and Pakistan, in particular, in the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir where this community has its origins. It investigated the reasons behind the children’s failure to respond to their music education and explored measures that might be taken to address them. The research revealed the complexity surrounding the issue of music education at primary level with reference to British Punjabi Muslims and included an analysis of the music enjoyed by the community and the education the children received in school. 

The Research

I shall highlight three areas I consider to be of great influence upon these children’s music development: a) recognition of the children’s ethnicity; b) an understanding of their musical experiences and c) the particular pedagogical strategies used to teach them.

The Children’s Ethnicity

The OFSTED report referred to the children as being mainly “from Asian homes”. When I interviewed the mothers of the children in the class researched I discovered that approximately 85% of the school’s pupil population have origins in Pakistan, in particular, they are Muslims from the Mirpuri district of Azad (free) Kashmir. Of the families interviewed, all children had at least one parent born in Pakistan and nearly 70% had both parents born there. My research showed it was insufficient to refer to the children as “Asian”. It is true that those whose origins are in South Asia tend to refer to themselves as ‘Asian’ but this is insufficient when considering their cultural backgrounds for education purposes. Recognising and valuing the children’s cultural background and experiences is paramount.

Music in the Community

It is well documented, for religious reasons, that Muslim children might not be allowed to participate in music making (Parker-Jenkins, 1995, Hewitt, 1996). In my search for information I could only find one author who has written specifically about Mirpuris and music in Britain (Baily, 1995). Baily maintains there are only a few musicians amongst the Mirpuri community in Britain. Those few, whether amateur or professional, do not play traditional Mirpuri music. He concludes that “overall, the Mirpuris reject music”. However, these were not my findings. Although all the children I researched attended the madrassahs (religious schools) to learn the Qur’an, all the families except two told me that their children: watched Indian films; collected and played audio tapes including film songs and Mirpuri traditional music; and regularly listened to religious music called Naats. Indeed, despite some views to the contrary, both within and beyond Muslim communities, children from this community do listen to, and experience, music.³ 

An Analysis of the Music 

The music that British Punjabi Muslim children hear and experience in their community comes mainly from Indian films and Islamic religious music. They are based on different pitch and interval systems, have different structural organization, and convey messages different from those understood and enjoyed by those brought up listening to music of the Western European tradition. My richest source came from the children of the schools I visited and from their mothers. Several mothers gave me videos of the film music and songs they really enjoyed and wanted me to know about them. Space constraints do not allow me to present a detailed analysis of these musical genres. As is the tradition in Indian music, my findings show that the melodies used in the films communicated a subtext of mood that enabled the music to express a separate narrative very different from the story and dialogue being portrayed on the screen. Likewise, when studying the religious music with which members of the community were familiar, I used recordings of Qur’anic chanting and religious songs gleaned from tapes that I bought in the community and in Mirpur. I discovered that in these recitations and religious songs, phrase structures are very different from those of music in the West and lead the listener to have different expectations of musical resolutions.

Bentley Test

My research showed that the music the children from the Mirpuri community listened to at home differed from the music they learned at school. However, this did not prove the musical perception of these children would necessarily be different, or that the music curriculum available in schools would be unsuitable. Further investigations were necessary to see if the children appeared to hear music differently from children from other communities.

There are several music cognition tests used to assess the ‘musical ability’ of children. I used the Bentley ‘Measures of Musical Abilities’ (1966) to test children in my research community to give me an indication as to their response to a standard British test for musical aptitude. Although a fairly old test, it was still the main test used in the 1980s in schools and, apart from some criticism of its limited technology, was well respected (Mills 1984). This aptitude test was used to ascertain what might be thought of as the ‘physical’ skill of the hearing ear: could the listener tell differences in pitch, memorise tunes, determine how many notes were being played simultaneously, and hear changes in rhythm?

When I used the test in the 1970s in a comprehensive school⁴ in North London, I discovered children from the Asian community, most of whom had come to Britain from Uganda, achieved very low marks. I suspected the test was culturally biased and stopped using it. With this new component of my research I decided to find out if, 25 years later, it might still appear to be culturally biased and if it proved to be so, would indicate that children from different cultural backgrounds might hear music in different ways. I ran the test in the Year five/six⁵ class in six separate primary schools. A total of 157 pupils were tested both from the South Asian community and from the British White community; the average age was eleven. The results were as follows:

Figure 1: Results of Bentley Test

Further analysis of the tests convinced me these results showed British Asian children were not less able than their British White peers, but rather that they perceived the sounds differently.

Vygotsky 

The final Orders (or statutes) of the National Curriculum (Department of Education and Science [DES], 1992) established the requirement to extend pupils’ musical experience by including works from a variety of Western and non-Western cultures. But much of the pedagogical decisions that take place in the classroom are based upon an understanding of how children in the indigenous White community develop musically. The Orders do not take into consideration the needs of the our culturally diverse nature of British society, and no attempt has been made subsequently to identify the manner in which provision could be made for the music educational needs of children from minority communities (Hall, 1992). When devising the music orders for the National Curriculum that were finalised in 1992, attempts were made to place some limit and order upon the breadth and styles of music education that existed. However no attempt was made to suggest the manner in which it could be successfully delivered. In keeping with other National Curriculum statements, teachers were told “what” to teach, but not necessarily “how” to teach it (DES, 1992; National Curriculum Council [NCC], 1992). 

Teachers in primary schools are encouraged to teach music to their classes regardless of their own musical experiences and despite inadequate initial teacher training. One of my concerns emanating from reading relevant literature was the lack of guidelines and reference to pedagogy available for teachers. I therefore required a model that would explain more fully the role of the teacher in the learning process. I found what I was looking for in the work of the Russian theorist Lev Vygotsky. 

Vygotsky believed imitation and instruction play a major role in the child’s development. He criticised the “notion that development can run its normal course and reach a high level without assistance from instruction” (1962: 93). Vygotsky regarded social interaction between peers and adults as important in creating meaning, making sense and conveying culture within a shared context. He believed that interactions with more knowledgeable others, particularly adults, enable a child to make educational progress. Vygotsky called this procedure working within the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD). This zone is where “With assistance, every child can do more than he can by himself – though only within the limits set by the state of his development” (ibid., p. 103).⁶ Interactive teaching styles used by experienced music teachers influenced by the techniques of Kódaly and Orff and by coincidence mirroring the theories of Vygotsky, have not been passed on to ‘generalist’ class teachers. There has been no attempt made to associate music education pedagogy with the general educational theories with which primary classroom teachers may be already acquainted.

Vygotsky was concerned with the individual child supported one-to-one by the adult. This sets a challenge for the class teacher. How can we find what the child’s limits are, and can we do this for more than one child at a time? Wood and Attfield (1996) refer to Newman and Holzman (1993) who, in their interpretation of Vygotsky’s theories, argue that the school classroom should itself be a zone of proximal development (ZPD). Wood and Attfield discuss the importance of organising the classroom to enable high quality interaction to take place between adults and other children, and to embrace teaching strategies which will provide children with opportunities for conversation and interaction, problem creating and problem solving.

Wood (1998) coined the term ‘scaffolding’ to describe the procedure whereby the teacher helps the child complete a task which the latter would not have been able to do without help. ‘Scaffolding’ is commonly adopted to describe aspects of language acquisition in childhood in which the listening partner supplies what is missing and in this way sympathetically supports the child’s emerging conversations (p. 55). Young (1995), whilst pointing out that this is well known in other aspects of education, suggests that this is a technique that could usefully be implemented in music education. 

Conclusion: The Children’s Musical Education

I conclude by stating that many children in schools are being let down because the information necessary to ensure their satisfactory education is not being provided and suggest that this is applicable to other minority groups. Moreover teachers are also being let down because the tools necessary to satisfactorily educate these pupils have not been made available to them. 

The content of the school curriculum in the UK has undergone many changes but the nature of the musical experience to children from different cultural backgrounds was never seriously considered. I suggest that teachers need to be alert to the fact that children come to school with different experiences and these must be recognised and utilised in the classroom if the children are to make satisfactory progress. Three factors should be considered:

a) The school needs to recognise and respect children’s previous experiences.
b) The content of the curriculum must be relevant to the home-cultures of the children.
c) A different, interactive pedagogy which sufficiently motivates and enables children with multiple cultural experiences is necessary.

References

Baily, J. (1995) ‘The Role of Music in Three British Muslim Communities’, in Diaspora, 4, (1): 77-87.

Bentley A. (1966) Measures of Musical Ability. London: Harrap.

Department of Education and Science (DES) (1992) Music in the National Curriculum (England), London: DES. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office (HMSO).

Hall, S. (1992) ‘New Ethnicities’ in J. Donald and A. Rattansi, (eds.) Race, Culture and Difference. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Hewitt, I. (1996) ‘Orchestrating Laxity’ in Much Ado About Music: Proceedings of the Conference on Islam and Music. London: Association of Muslim Researchers.

Mills, J. (1984) ‘The ‘Pitch’ Subtest of Bentley’s Measures’ in Psychology of Music, 12 (2): 94-105.

National Curriculum Council (NCC) (1992) Music: Non-statutory Guidance, York: NCC. 

Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (1993) Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist, London: Routledge.

Parker-Jenkins, M. (1995) Children of Islam. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.

Vygotsky, L. (1962) Thought and Language. Cambridge Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press.

Wood, D. (1998) How Children Think and Learn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wood, L. and Attfield, J. (1996) Play, Learning and the Early Childhood Curriculum, London: Chapman.

Young, S. (1995) ‘Physical Movement: Its Place in Music Education’, in, British Journal of Music Education, 9: 187-94.

¹ Of necessity, this article is too short to give in-depth details of the research carried out. Correspondence is welcome at this email address: jill@scarfe.co.uk

² Editor’s note: Reception Year class pupils are aged between 4 and 5.

³ For more detail on this aspect of my research please see Intercultural Music Volume 7.

⁴ Editor’s note: a secondary or high school offering a broad curriculum.

⁵ Editor’s note: children in Year 5 are aged between 9 and 10 and those in Year 6 are aged between 10 and 11. 

⁶ Editor’s note: it is understood that the masculine form stands for both masculine and feminine.