Inquiry into an unknown musical practice: an example of learning through project and investigation

Abstract

Abstract - The music pedagogy department at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon has built a training programme based on project and inquiry, inspired by the theories of John Dewey and Louis Legrand. The students are asked to investigate a musical practice that they are not familiar with before. They meet musicians, perform with them, they conduct interviews, prepare pedagogical workshops, read documentation, and animate a seminar. The idea is that they through this process become able to raise new questions derived from action experiences. The following article unfolds the theoretical foundations of this project, and describes how it is implemented by showing an example of students who have investigated bèlè, which is a music and dance form from Martinique. This ‘inquiry’ and project constitutes a challenge for the students that changes their understanding of what music and what learning music are. Conducting an investigation allows students to take a global view of the musical issues – an approach that differ from how most of them usually focus mostly on ‘musical material’. They identify the multiplicity of conditions for the emergence of a musical practice, which is essential since they have to encourage and accompany new practices as pedagogues in the futures.