Unsettling ‘necessities’: a poststructural analysis of curricular policy and its implementation in state secondary level music education in Malta

Mallia, S. (2024) Unsettling ‘necessities’: a poststructural analysis of curricular policy and its implementation in state secondary level music education in Malta. Doctoral thesis, Royal College of Music.

Abstract

This research project has grown from my professional concern to grapple with the ‘necessities’ through which curricular policy and music education operate. As a Maltese citizen whose personal and professional identity is deeply intertwined with the institutional practice of music education, I take its curricular context as the site of analysis. Existing scholarship pertaining to the Maltese context takes policy as a taken-for-granted framework for speaking about and researching music education. As a result, there emerges a lack of analytic concern on two fronts: how the ‘necessary’ changes proposed regulate possibilities for the curricular practice of music education, and how taken-for-granted assumptions about music and music education shape acts of implementation. In an attempt to unsettle the assumptions that structure existing research practices and address resulting analytic lacunae, I first direct my focus to the concept of policy as a diverse and tension-laden landscape of practice. Drawing primarily on the work of Colebatch, Hoppe, and Noordegraaf (2010) and Michel Foucault, I evaluate policy through three different perspectives. I then propose the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (Bacchi 2009) and ‘Poststructural Interview Analysis’ (Bacchi and Bonham 2016) frameworks as useful apparatus for the analysis of its proposals and effects, and I discuss how these have been adopted and applied within this research project. The outcomes of my analysis are presented in four sections. In the first section, I put forward my analysis of the ‘Educators’ Guide to Pedagogy and Assessment: Music’ (2015), which constitutes the latest published curricular policy document relating to music education in Malta. This serves as a useful text for analysing the ‘necessary changes’ proposed by the current National Curriculum Framework and their ‘rationalised’ implications for music education. In the second section, the focus of my analysis shifts to the corresponding syllabus for the end-of-cycle assessment of music (Secondary Education Certificate) as a site of implementation at secondary level. In section three, I bring together the outcomes of each analysis and make use of interview transcripts to discuss the effects which these two sets of proposals carry on ‘educators’ and ‘learners’. The final section draws on marginalised perspectives to unsettle the ‘necessity’ of these proposals and emphasise their inadequacy in light of the discussed effects. I conclude with a set of reflections and recommendations for further research.

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