Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

Current disparities towards student success (Weatherton and Schussler, 2021), pressure to address graduate attributes in addition to subject expertise (Hill, Walkington and France, 2016) and students who struggle academically due to widening participation are an issue in creative arts education such as popular music. Teachers are predominantly industry experts with limited teaching experience and can be overwhelmed having to teach beyond the curriculum, developing attributes and supporting academic study. Innovative teaching methods must be developed to nurture criticality, creativity, and employability. Musostudy, a bespoke pedagogy, supports teachers to enhance student success in popular music with a three-part model addressing engagement, module/assessment mastery, and academic study skills. Developed my doctoral research, it caters to students preferring practical, relevant sessions and requiring support in engagement and academic skills. Taking a pragmatic approach, the central principle of this model is to enable students’ module mastery, achieved through embedding activities into sessions to enrich rather than overload an already busy scheme of work. Musostudy aims to improve student success outcomes for students from all backgrounds by promoting active learning, for module mastery, engagement and the development of creative, critical and academic skills. The research suggests that teachers struggle to address students’ needs, requiring support to teach for student success. A bespoke pedagogy, such as Musostudy, has an important role in developing and supporting practice and can be a nexus in developing a community of practice. This paper introduces Musostudy, describing how, based on my research findings, it can transform vocational, creative arts teaching.