‘Chasing every mark’. High stakes assessment and curriculum narrowing: the case of disciplinary literacy in the Irish secondary music classroom

Abstract

The critical role of disciplinary literacy in enhancing understanding and engagement within arts-based subjects has drawn increased recognition amongst researchers and practitioners alike in recent years. The successful integration of disciplinary literacy into the classroom however has been challenged in equal measures by a prevailing sense of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the concept of disciplinary literacy and by the concurrent, deep-rooted pressures of performativity experienced by teachers and pupils operating within regimes of examination intensification. The result of these tensions has been a documented increase in reductionist classroom-based approaches to the development of disciplinary literacy. Given the frequently cited importance of engaged disciplinary literacy encounters in the music classroom, a review of the dominant pedagogical practices in this field is germane. This paper reports on the findings of a study exploring the integration of disciplinary literacy in the Irish secondary school music classroom. The findings of this research demonstrate a dominance of listening and performing strategies in classroom-based literacy development initiatives and an aligned relegation of student verbalisation in the music classroom. Recommendations for more disciplinary engaged, student-centred approaches in the development of music literacy within the secondary classroom are outlined.