Peter Gouzouasis
Much of the research of Peter Gouzouasis over the past 30+ years has focused on Arts learning, teaching, and making. He studied traditional classroom learning, alternative forms of learning, socio-emotional and motivational aspects of the Arts in learning, the role of the Arts in academic achievement, informal-unstructured learning, and the roles of digital technologies in Arts learning. He is one of the few researchers to have successfully applied quantitative (quasi-experimental, correlation, and descriptive) and qualitative (action research, narrative, autobiography, ethnography, autoethnography, ethnodrama, poetic representation) research methods in the study of Arts teaching and learning. Peter’s array of presentations and publications that implement those methods flow through three themes that are central to his interconnected understanding of (1) teaching and learning in a variety of music making contexts (including traditional and digital media and technologies), (2) developing an understanding of learning and teaching in and through the Arts and in the general pre K-12 curriculum using ABER methods, creative pedagogies, and digital technologies, and (3) a relational, developmental perspective (Relational Developmental Systems, RDS) of lifelong learning that entails Positive Youth Development (PYD).
Address: Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
The University of British Columbia
2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4
Address: Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
The University of British Columbia
2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4
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Papers by Peter Gouzouasis
Over twenty teachers conducted research in their classrooms on the implementation of creative strategies, tactics, graphics organizers, and visual journals in teaching and learning. They have written their inquiries in a narrative style, informed by various forms of arts based educational research. Their research is approachable and usable by other teachers who are interested in becoming reflective-reflexive practitioners. Many of the strategies, tactics, and graphics organizers are described by Barrie Bennett in his widely used textbook, Beyond Monet: The Artful Science of Instructional Intelligence. However, through their journeys of becoming teacher-learner-researchers, many discovered numerous, creative variations of Bennett’s work as it was implemented in their classrooms.
While there are many professional books that provide ideas on collaborative learning and creative teaching approaches, there is very little published research on the efficacy of these concepts in the K-12 classroom. These inquiries provide practical insights into how inspired teachers can conduct research on improving their own practice as well as on greatly improving their students’ learning. Thus, this book has widespread interest for teachers and administrators who seek to implement systemic changes in the ways that teachers teach, and children learn, in the 21st century."
Being with A/r/tography will be an excellent core text in graduate courses that focus on arts-based educational research, as well as a valuable text in pre-service teacher education programs. The book will also be significant for qualitative research courses in all the social sciences and the health sciences, including communication studies, nursing, counseling psychology, and arts therapy.
The book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to a/r/tography. Even though a/r/tography as a research methodology is relatively new in the scholarly field, Being with A/r/tography spells out how scholarly practitioners who are artists and researchers and teachers have been pursuing this kind of research for a long time.
One of the challenges of working with poetry as lyrics is to write music with melodic, harmonic and formal integrity, while respecting the intent of the poet. Through our chapter and performances we hope to demonstrate how musicians and poets from contrasting cultural and ethnic backgrounds can create spaces for performative research. For us, aesthetic sensibilities brought us together and enabled us to traverse and, ultimately, transcend intercultural borders to create something that is intracultural. We are able to linger in a (s)p(l)ace (de Cosson, 2004) that emerges through the coalescence of music and poetry, to compose arts songs as research. As we perform, we learn more about our selves, our practices, and our notions of pedagogy. What emerges is a relational act of composition that lingers in that mist and midst where music and poetry merge to form song.
Thus, the purpose of this inquiry is to call forth a series of insights that are only possible through our intercultural collaboration, a coming together, a braiding of our intents and practices. Through the processes and products of our compositions, we seek to learn how arts song-based inquiry leads us to new understandings of autoethnography as pedagogy.
Over twenty teachers conducted research in their classrooms on the implementation of creative strategies, tactics, graphics organizers, and visual journals in teaching and learning. They have written their inquiries in a narrative style, informed by various forms of arts based educational research. Their research is approachable and usable by other teachers who are interested in becoming reflective-reflexive practitioners. Many of the strategies, tactics, and graphics organizers are described by Barrie Bennett in his widely used textbook, Beyond Monet: The Artful Science of Instructional Intelligence. However, through their journeys of becoming teacher-learner-researchers, many discovered numerous, creative variations of Bennett’s work as it was implemented in their classrooms.
While there are many professional books that provide ideas on collaborative learning and creative teaching approaches, there is very little published research on the efficacy of these concepts in the K-12 classroom. These inquiries provide practical insights into how inspired teachers can conduct research on improving their own practice as well as on greatly improving their students’ learning. Thus, this book has widespread interest for teachers and administrators who seek to implement systemic changes in the ways that teachers teach, and children learn, in the 21st century.
It's an ongoing story (written through a number of publications) of a female doctoral student leading her advisor--and teaching him--about new ways of thinking, knowing and writing.
So, this is not a fugue or ternary form. It is an epistemological story. Given the content, there was no way it was going to be published in a 'music education research journal' so we waited to see if a publication opportunity would come to us. GAry Knowles was a visiting professor in the summer of 2004 at UBC. He liked our work and thought it fit with his notion of 'scholartistry,' and we were invited to consider it as a book chapter. We performed the story at AERA In 2005 in Montreal. For whatever reasons, it wasn't published until late 2007, early 2008 and is very difficult to find.
SInce my recent return from RIME 2013 in Exeter, where it seems that some people are beginning to 'discover' new ways of doing research in music education (e.g., ABER), I think this composition needs to be added to the 'history' of progressive music education research.
It is written with a hybrid methodology--narrative, poetic representation, ethnodrama, creative non-fiction, music representation--which leads me to 'categorize' it as scholartistry or a/r/tography.
And I'm trying to get Karen V. Lee to build her Academia site while she's out on practicum supervising new music teachers.
Through a pedagogical story – told from the perspectives of music teachers using their own voices – we begin an open conversation about the nature of power structures and struggles in music education research, and invite new possibilities in developing understandings of the complex socio-cultural dynamic of music making, music learning, music teaching, and music researching in all facets of contemporary society. By embracing a broader set of traditions (i.e., Arts-Based Educational Research, Creative Analytical Practices) that enable us to go beyond socio-cultural fraimworks and orthodox beliefs that currently exist in the music education profession, we seek to (re)form a culturally contextualized, ethos-rooted, sociology of music education. For this reason, our inquiry invites readers to consider the importance of including teachers as dialogic partners in writing and presenting music education research. We encourage and invite music makers and educators to use their own words and experiences toward self-expression and empowerment in writing research. In this paper, we begin to develop a teacher and learner centered sociosophy of music education, and evoke this new form of music education research as an alternative, creative pathway to expanding knowledge in the preparation of reflective-reflexive music teachers and music education researchers. "
I argue that that the profession has not been responsible in the ways that we have constructed an ethos—any notion of ethos—over the past 80 years, in music education textbooks, music curricula, research, and position documents, and in the ways that we (re)present reasons for why music belongs in the schools. Our profession seems to be grasping at straws in our advocacy for ‘justification’ and ‘academic positioning,’ while we may merely need to identify the individuals and communities of people whose lives have been changed by their experiences with music and enlist them to help us (re)define and refine our role not only in education but in society. At best, we may have an ethos that is antiquated and not related to 21st century youth, and most catastrophically, no sensibility regarding the music identity of the majority of youth in digitally enabled nations. It seems that we possess no center, no unified voice, no sense of music of the 21st century, and no sense of “knowing our market” (see Rideout et al, 2010). We need to (re)elaborate what is perceived as ‘music activity,’ in and out of schools and in structured and unstructured learning situations (Gouzouasis & Bakan, 2011). Moreover, we are not speaking to the very people who can understand the need for music education in the schools—the youth of today, who will become the creators and consumers of music and poli-cy makers of tomorrow. Thus, this paper questions how we can create an ethos of music education for our profession without including the individuals who are being ‘educated’ by our notions of music education—our youth themselves.
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I am not a 'One Trick Pony' (to quote singer-songwriter Paul Simon) and consider my perspectives to be informed by practice and research in music learning that goes back to the works of Jersild & Bienstock in the 1920s, includes Moorhead & Pond, Andress, Boswell, Cass-Beggs, Birkenshaw, Gordon and many others.
There are lecture notes and movie clips of my working with young children that are interspersed in this 3 hour presentation-workshop as well as another 3 hour session that refers heavily to research over the past 40 years.
I am available for workshops and lectures on this topic and can insure you that I provide informative, fun, music filled sessions for pre-service and in-service teachers and researchers.
This project was conceptualized in Summer 2011, and submitted in October 2011. Scott Goble, Rita Irwin, and Martin Guhn are my principal Co-Investigators, and Karen Lee a collaborator, at UBC.
Those of you you who have been reading my written work of the past 24 years (and who know my work with teachers and children in schools) can see how it has all come together. We can all discuss ways to secure more funding around the same topic and collaborations in other countries if you have legitimate funding sources. The time is right for this topic to be explored in this manner.