Theories of interpersonal dynamics have been an integral part of research in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and the social sciences but have not been systematically applied to music teaching. The present study makes use of Sigmund Freud's theory of the defence mechanisms of the personality, demonstrating how these mechanisms operate in shaping the diagnostic and remedial content of the student- teacher dyad in four private violin lessons. Drawn from 12 hours of videotaped lessons, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the behaviours of eight subjects supports the hypothesis that the manifest contents of the lesson interactions are dominated by the unconscious aims of either or both members of the dyad. These findings are consistent with the extensive psychiatric literature on the defences of personality in everyday life and suggest that observation and interpretation of these phenomena are of value to teachers and educators interested in the relation between task and personality in the setting of the private lesson.
This paper looks at the ways in which various modalities of qualitative research can complexify children in the face of statistically-based assessment measures, psychiatric diagnoses, and other labels of risk labels used in schools. The authors look at such labeling as what Bhabha (1994) terms "metonymy," or a perceptual flattening process by which a part of a person comes to represent the whole. They undermine, and counteract this process of metonymy by using two different qualitative research methodsmetaphorical analysis and arts-based research. They extend their arguments to posit that we are in a period where researchers, administrators, and policy makers are increasingly using statistics to place humans into categories, and to determine "best-practices" that obscure individual characteristics and needs. They argue that the multiple and particularistic lenses provided by various types of the qualitative gaze are useful to remind us of the rich and complex ways in which humans differ from each other.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.