Teaching jazz voice performance education in Australian regional secondary schools: Investigating the challenges

This project sought to examine the challenges faced by classroom music teachers in regional Australian secondary schools when they taught senior music students who wished to add jazz vocal repertoire to their examination performance program. As a jazz voice clinician who has presented workshops in schools for over a decade, I have had informal discussions with classroom music teachers about what areas of their teaching they find the most challenging. Many of the teachers who had not been trained in singing or in jazz indicated that they feel inadequately prepared to guide those students wishing to perform jazz vocal repertoire for their senior music examinations. This project was borne out of my curiosity to examine if this was a common issue amongst classroom music teachers in Australia and inspired me to investigate if they faced other challenges. Sixty regional secondary school classroom music teachers were surveyed in order to ascertain their level of teaching experience and musical background, how confident they were when teaching jazz as a genre, their familiarity with jazz vocal repertoire and what resources were already in use and being used effectively when working with senior jazz vocal students. Follow-up interviews with six regionally based secondary school classroom music teachers focused on their lived experiences teaching senior jazz vocal students in the classroom. Using a mixed methodology approach, the qualitative and quantitative data from the survey and interviews were analysed to identify common themes relating to the challenges the teachers faced when teaching jazz vocal students. Analysis of the data suggests that while the teachers’ personal music interests are the key to developing their skills when teaching out of their area of expertise, they are time-poor. This is not only due to being part of a small music department and having to take on a bigger teaching role both in and out of the classroom, but also having to teach subjects other than music, or teaching out-of-field. The interview data also revealed that the pre-service teacher education courses for classroom music teachers should have more time allocated for learning practical skills that are needed in the classroom. These skills include conducting a band or choir or developing skills in playing a genre or instrument in which they have not been trained, such as jazz voice. This is reflective of the specialised and multi-faceted nature of teaching classroom music in regional Australia. The teachers also indicated that they had experienced various types of isolation, including geographic, cultural, educational, and professional. One of the main findings was that teachers in regional areas struggle to access appropriate professional development due to the travel time and expense that travelling to a major city entails. The research has shown that as the teachers were not always able to attend professional development courses, especially on a topic as specific as learning jazz vocal repertoire, there is need for more targeted professional development courses and mentoring opportunities to be made available online or delivered to regional centres. The project investigated what pedagogical resources were currently used and the extent to which the teachers’ own musical backgrounds help or hinder their ability to teach jazz voice confidently. In order to create appropriate resources which will be used by classroom music teachers it was important to determine what specific pedagogical resources are needed when guiding jazz vocal students through their senior music programs, and to ascertain what type of resources teachers prefer and will use. The interview data showed that the teachers predominantly prefer short, ten-minute videos that guide them step-by-step through teaching methods that will enable them to help their students extend their educational outcomes. In summary, the findings of this research project have shown that teachers lack confidence when teaching jazz vocal students if they have not had experience in jazz or singing themselves. Their busy position as a regional classroom teacher leaves them with limited time for upskilling and travelling to professional development courses is often too time consuming and expensive. The knowledge that teachers would be interested in attending a professional development course on teaching jazz voice and would use resources that help them guide jazz vocal students provides an opportunity for developing further research into the creation of a multi-media package that offers guidance to the teacher in short modules that can also be counted towards their professional learning.