Questions of youth, identity and social difference in the classroom study of popular music: a case study in the development of media education by Christopher Owen Richards A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education Institute of Education University of London January 1998 1 Abstract This thesis is centrally concerned with just one specific practice, teaching Media Studies with school students in the 14-18 age phase, and with one marginal feature of that practice, the study of popular music. The thesis explores the place of popular music in Media Studies and, in doing so, engages with issues of social and educational identity for people in the last years of secondary schooling. The introduction initiates an autobiographical theme, subsequently informing discussion of the negotiation of identities between the researcher and the school students. Chapter 1 provides an account of popular music in the literature of media education and in the parallel literature of music education. Chapter 2 reviews aspects of debates around 'adolescence' and 'youth', with reference to questions of 'agency', and thus provides a background for the analysis of data presented in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Chapter 3 offers an overview of methodology and sets out a chronology of the research with particular emphasis upon its progressi ve focusing. The methodological precedents for the thesis lie in action research and in the development of 'reflective practice' in teacher education, and particularly within English and media education itself. Chapters 4 and 5 report upon a taught unit relating to popular music, conducted in collaboration with a Head of English. Within the frame of the institutional relation between teacher and taught, issues of class and gender are given particular attention in the analysis of the data. Chapter 6 reports a more 'experimental' intervention in Media Studies practice. The chapter derives from a further phase of research with first year A Level Media Studies students in a selective school and extends the earlier discussion of gender and class in relation to modes of (self) representation within particular educational settings. Chapter 7 reviews the research and considers future possibilities for teaching pop music in secondary school Media Studies. CONTENTS Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Chapter 1 Youth, Music and Media Education Chapter 2 Questions of Agency and Adolescence Chapter 3 Classroom Research: Contexts and Identities Chapter 4 Transient, Tactical, Knowledge Chapter 5 Classroom Subjects (with illustrations) Chapter 6 Desert Island Discs Chapter 7 Conclusions Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Bibliography 3 Acknowledgements This thesis was written between 1992 and 1995, when I was a Lecturer in the Department of English, Media and Drama at the University of London Institute of Education. It was revised through 1996 and 1997. I want to thank my supervisors, David Buckingham and Gunther Kress, for their detailed advice, encouragement and support. I also want to thank Debbie Epstein (Institute of Education) and Peter Medway (Carleton University, Ottawa) for making the effort to read, and respond posi tively to, an earlier version of this thesis. Subsequent drafts of the whole thesis were read by Joe Tobin (Centre for Youth Research, University of Hawaii), Julian Sefton-Green (Central School of Speech and Drama), Janet Maw (Insti tute of Education) and by Gemma Moss (Uni versi ty of Southampton). I want to thank all of them for their support and advice. Everyone in the following list has also had a hand in the shaping of this thesis - so thanks to them too: Nikki Blackborow, Sara Bragg, Roz Brody, Tony Burgess, Cath Cinnamon, Phil Cohen, Angela Devas, Anton Franks, Pete Fraser, Lucy Green, John Hardcastle, Roger Hewitt, Valerie Hey, Ken Jones, Joyce Little, Janet Maybin, Cameron McCarthy, Jane Miller, Richard Quarshie, Muriel Robinson, Lyn Thomas and Anne Turvey. I want to thank all those teachers, and all the students, who both tolerated and supported my research. Some of the material in this thesis was first presented to participants in the Special Interest Group - Media, Culture and Curriculum at the Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association. I want to thank Glenn Hudak and Zena Moore for keeping the connection alive. I especially want to thank Elizabeth Rouse (whom I met first in April 1967, and second in the Autumn of 1968) and my daughters Fay and Cesca, for putting up with everything and, despite it all, for continuing to be interested. I also want to thank my nephew Saul Richards for help with Chapter 6. My father, Roy Ernest Richards, October 9th 1917 - September 8th 1984, left me enough money to buy a new stereo after his death. As the thanks can't be heard the thesis is in his memory. *** 4 Several chapters, originally written as conference papers, have also been published, if often in another form. Edited extracts from Chapter 1 have been published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Vol.16 No.3. Appendix 1 was presented to the first Domains of Literacy Conference, at the Institute of Education, September 1992. Chapter 4 was presented to the Media, Culture and Curriculum Special Interest Group at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, Georgia, April 1993; it was subsequently published as 'The English Curriculum - What's music got to do with it?' in Changing English Vol. 1 No.2. Chapter 5 was presented to the second Domains of Literacy Conference, September 1994. An earlier draft of Chapter 6 was presented to the Media, Culture and Curriculum Special Interest Group at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, April 1995. A version of Chapter 7 was presented to the Symposium on 'Post-Conservative Programmes of Reform', at the European Conference on Educational Research at the University of Bath, September 1995. It has been published as a chapter in David Buckingham (ed.), Teaching Popular Culture: Beyond Radical Pedagogy (UCL Press, 1997). Part II of the introduction ('Putting Cultural Studies in Its Place?') was included in a presentation to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in New Orleans, April 1994 - and subsequently published in Cultural Studies - A Research Volume, edited by Norman K. Denzin (JAI Press, 1996). A slightly different version of the complete thesis has been published as Teen Spirits: Music and Identity in Media Education (UCL Press, 1998) 5 Foreword This is a thesis about teaching popular music wi thin the constraints of formal courses in Media Studies. Media Studies in schools has attempted to engage with the informal cultural experience of young people and has aspired to provide the means to explore and to reflect upon such experience. But it has done so from within the constraints of the formal school curriculum and with an often uncomfortable mix of censure and celebration of popular cultural forms. In this context, pop music stands out as an especially awkward case and, for that reason among others, I have made its place in Media Studies my main concern. In the main empirical chapters of this thesis, I examine data derived from, and peculiar to, insti tutional exchanges between teacher and taught in the conduct of GCSE and A Level Media Studies courses. These are insti tutional encounters and are of interest as particular instances of the negotiation of identities between students and between students and teachers. In Media Studies lessons informal knowledge and experience of popular culture is rearticulated through the formal practices of school: in, for example, 'discussions', 'evaluations' and , assignments' . Thus, though arguing for the place of popular music wi thin Media Studies, the thesis explores the difficulties, the disjunctions and failur~s, as well as the possibilities, faced by teachers in this field. 6 The main precedent for this research, and an initiative in which I was myself involved, lies in the work of the Media Teachers' Research Group at the Institute of Education, active through 1987-1990, and culminating in the publication of Watching Media Learning: Making Sense of Media Education (Buckingham, 1990). Other studies have followed Watching Media Learning, notably Cultural Studies Goes to School (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 19994) and Making Media: Practical Production in Media Education (Buckingham, Grahame, and Sefton-Green 1995). This thesis, in common with these precedents, presents arguments which are located within, and return to address, this very particular social practice - teaching Media Studies. Its distinctive contribution to this field lies in its more sustained discussion of attempts to engage with pop music and in its development of a 'reflective practice' perspective to include autobiographical notes on my self-formation as a Media Studies teacher. The introduction to this thesis begins with another kind of precedent for the research that I have done. Simon Frith's book Sound Effects (1983), and much of Frith's other writing on popular music (see Frith, 1996) , has been widely influential in Cultural Studies and beyond. Nevertheless, it seems that an example of school based research included in 7 both Sound Effects and the earlier The Sociology of Rock (1978), has been neglected, remembered only, perhaps, as a footnote to the wider argument about youth and the music industry. I have recovered Frith's school based research because it provides an 'early' example of an enquiry into school students' informal knowledge of popular music. However, it also provides a marked contrast to my own enquiry because what I present in the main empirical chapters of the thesis is not a sociology of the students' Ii ves but an account of the forms in which they represent their experience of popular music in Media Studies lessons. I chose to do research in classrooms because, rather than attempt to investigate a youth culture 'out there', as constructed in the 'subcultural' literature, I wanted to make questions of teaching, and of the negotiation of identities between teacher and taught, central.