Music teaching myths

Last night’s MufuChat looked at myths faced by music teachers. Our Musical Futures Facebook community had plenty to say on the subject! The myth-like phrases heard by music teachers include:

• ‘Music isn’t important enough for an after-school detention’
• ‘Music doesn’t need as much timetable allocation as other subjects’
• ‘(S)he can do extra-curricular music, (s)he doesn’t need to take music at GCSE’
• ‘Studying music won’t help you in the future’
• ‘Music is just an enrichment subject’

Do these myths seem familiar to you? Have you encountered any others?

Or, to take a more controversial point-of-view, are they music education myths at all? Are they, in fact, inconvenient music teaching truths? We would love to hear your thoughts in our community.

Regular contributors to MufuChat won’t be surprised to learn that our teachers had plenty of solutions to offer when faced with a disturbing myth. From providing senior leaders and parents with research showing the value of music to pointing to personal success stories.

Myths and Musical Futures

Abigail D’Amore, Musical Futures’ CEO, recently wrote a blog post looking at the myths that have grown around our organisation. In particular, this blog post addresses myths that Musical Futures is:

• a scheme of work
• a fully-funded programme
• still part of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation

Myths can build around anything – music as a subject or an organisation set up to support it. It’s always worth taking a moment to  challenge myths and consider the most constructive way to do so.

In her blog post, our CEO achieves this by looking at the range of research surrounding pupil and teacher outcomes from Musical Futures and highlighting the income-generation work that takes place to fund the organisation.

Have your say on music teaching myths

You can join in with the discussion over our Musical Futures Facebook community where we conduct weekly chats looking at key issues in music education. Just straight to the first question of the chat by using this link.

Join us on 18th January 2017 at 8pm, when we will be looking at how Musical Futures can help prepare pupils for and support them through GCSE Music.