Music Education
The Music Education unit of Sydney Conservatorium of Music offers undergraduate and postgraduate training in a wide range of types of music teaching and learning. These include: classroom music education, popular music ensembles, bands and choirs, studio teaching, and non-Western instrumental groups. The work of the unit focuses on practical experience as the basis of all teaching and learning; it concentrates on creativity as the area through which music is taught and learnt and places cultural diversity at the centre of its programs. Field-based experience is also a feature of Music Education programs.
Research in the Music Education unit is interdisciplinary in nature, combining the methodologies of education with those informed by ethnomusicological, sociological, psychological, historical, and cultural studies influences. Topics undertaken by research students in this Unit reflect the broad view of Music Education adopted at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. This is one which presents Music Education as the study of music teaching and learning from a range of perspectives in all the contexts where it occurs - from early childhood, through various levels of school and university systems, to studio teaching, community music activity, popular music, use of music in therapy, and music in notated and non-notated traditions. The work of Music Education staff is widely published in books and major international journals in music education, ethnomusicology, music psychology, popular music and cultural studies.
Music Education - Staff
Chair/Associate Professor
Kathryn Marsh, BA(Hons) DipEd SydTeachColl PhD
Associate Professor
Peter Dunbar-Hall, BA(Hons) DipEd MMus PhD UNSW
Lecturers
Anthony Hood, MSc DPhil York BMus(Hons)
James Renwick, GradDipArts(Res) UNSW BMus
Jennifer Rowley, GradDipHigherEd PhD UNSW LTCL Trinity RSA Cert TEFLA
Sharon Tindall-Ford, BEd SAust MEd PhD UNSW
Michael Webb, DipMusEd Alexander Mackie CAE BMus MA PhD Wesleyan BMus
Part-time Staff
Pauline Beston, DipMus(Ed) BEd N'cle(NSW) MMus UNSW PhD
Susan Head, GradDipEd ACU Level 3 ANCOS accreditation
Bronwyn Irvine, BMusEd, ACKME Qld
Neil McEwan, Cert(Cond) Meistersinger von Nürnberg MMus UNSW
PhD
Patricia Morton, DipMusEd NCastle BME MMus UNSW GradDipCouns & Psych Syd
Sandra Nash, Dalcroze Lic Lond Dalcroze Dip Sup Geneva BMus
Suzanne Oyston, BMusEd SydneyCAE MMus(Ed)
Damien Ricketson, BMus PGradCert RoyalConsHague PhD
Gary Watson, RSA Cert TEFLA MMus
Anne Wisdom, DipTeach UTS MMus UNSW
Biographies
Chair/Senior Lecturer
Kathryn Marsh, BA(Hons) DipEd SydTeachColl PhD
Dr Kathryn Marsh is a Senior Lecturer in music education, teaching subjects relating to primary and early childhood music education, multicultural music education and music education research methods. With a PhD in ethnomusicology and professional background in music education, her research interests include children's musical play, children's creativity, and multicultural and Aboriginal music education. Her recent cross-cultural studies of children's musical play in school playgrounds in central Australia, Norway, the UK, USA and Korea were funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the University of Sydney. As a member of a cross-disciplinary research team she conducted the National Review of School Music Education for the Department of Education Science and Training.
She has written a variety of scholarly and professional publications and has been actively involved in curriculum development and teacher in service for many years. She has held executive positions in the Australian Society for Music Education and the Musicological Society of Australia and is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Music Education. She has held visiting research positions at the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of Surrey, UK and has been invited to give presentations at universities in the UK, USA and Korea. She has also performed regularly as a singer, specialising in early music and contemporary art music, particularly in conjunction with the Sydney Chamber Choir.
Associate Professor/ Associate Dean (Graduate Studies)
Peter Dunbar-Hall, BA(Hons) DipEd MMus PhD UNSW
Peter Dunbar-Hall is a music educator and ethnomusicologist known for his research on contemporary aboriginal Australian music and Balinese music. He teaches music education and is the Associate Dean (Graduate Studies) at the Conservatorium of Music.
His current research focus is on music transmission (how music is learned and taught) in Balinese gamelan music. He is also a performing member of Sekaa Gong Tirta Sinar, a Sydney-based Balinese gamelan gong kebyar. He is also a partner investigator in a large ARC grant to research community music across Australia.
Dr. Dunbar-Hall has published widely in the areas of the history and philosophy of music education, Australian cultural history, Aboriginal music, popular music studies, and Balinese gamelan music and dance. He is the author of Strella Wilson: The Career of an Australian Singer (Redback Press, 1997), and is the co-author of Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places: Contemporary Aboriginal Music in Australia (UNSW Press, 2004) with Chris Gibson.
A graduate of the music departments of the University of Sydney (BA Hons) and the University of New South Wales (MMus, PhD), Dr Dunbar-Hall’s doctoral research was a sociological study of the stylistic characteristics of Aboriginal popular music.
Lecturers
James Renwick, GradDipArts(Res) UNSW BMus
James Renwick is a lecturer in music education, teaching research methods, instrumental pedagogy, and supervising research students.
Renwick’s research interests focus on applying the insights of educational psychology to music teaching and learning. His doctoral research at the University of New South Wales has involved collaborating with Gary McPherson and John McCormick on a study funded by the Australian Research Council, investigating associations between students' motivational beliefs, their practising behaviour, and performance achievement. Renwick's previous research has focused on detailed observational analyses of children's practising strategies.
A musicology graduate of the University of Sydney, Renwick also works as a clarinet and saxophone teacher and examiner.
Michael Webb, DipMusEd Alexander Mackie CAE BMus MA PhD Wesleyan
Dr Michael Webb, lecturer in music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, researches and publishes in the fields of ethnomusicology and music education. Current research activities include new literacies and classroom music learning, popular culture, ethnomusicology and education, and Melanesian hymnodies.
Webb holds a performance degree from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, studied trumpet with Armando Ghitalla in the United States and completed an MA in World Music and PhD in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, where he studied with Mark Slobin. He has extensive secondary and tertiary teaching experience, including in Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand (University of Auckland) and the United States (UNC-Greensboro).
For more than a decade, Webb was Head of Visual and Performing Arts at St Paul's Grammar School in Western Sydney where he implemented an innovative program that involved world music ensembles and stage productions including an adaptation of Rachel Perkins’ film, One Night the Moon. He left in early 2006 to join the faculty at the Conservatorium.
Webb is also an active performer in a variety of musical settings and enjoys writing about contemporary Australian jazz.
Jennifer Rowley BA GradDipEd MEd GradDipHigherEd PhD UNSW LTCL Trinity RSA Cert TEFLA
Jennifer Rowley, a lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, has been a teacher educator since 1993 and is committed to quality teaching by encouraging effective teaching, reflective practice and the development of a professional practitioner who understands and caters for individual differences. Dr Rowley’s research interests include teacher education, gifted education, teacher’s professional learning, teaching and learning in higher education and professional standards for teachers. She has extensive experience in planning and implementing professional development training programs tailored to a range of workplaces. Rowley has been a teacher, curriculum designer and developer and is experienced in the theory and practice of how adults learn.
Sharon Tindall-Ford: BEd(SACAE) MEd PhD UNSW
Sharon Tindall–Ford is a lecturer in education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, teaching subjects relating to educational and developmental psychology and co-ordinating the professional experience program for music eduction students.
Tindall-Ford earned her PhD at UNSW, where she specialised in learning and instruction, with an emphasis on cognitive load theory (CLT). She continues to research in CLT, and has recently been involved in enhancing the Sydney Conservatorium Professional Experience program through the use of WebCT. In addition to her work as an educator at the tertiary level, she has also taught in secondary schools in South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.