Music education in the digital age
Dr Martin Emo is graduating from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington this week with a PhD in Education, examining the experiences of secondary school music teachers with digital technology.
Before he started his PhD (and Masters), Dr Emo was working in secondary schools teaching music. He came to realise that he was able to help more students by providing support to teachers, thanks to his undergraduate music degree and experience working in music retail.
“I was able to cater for the diverse needs of students to the best of my ability, which included Western art music, classical, and jazz, but also electronic and popular/contemporary music as well.
My background gave me a unique ability to support teachers and students. What I started doing was supporting other teachers who didn't have the same opportunities as me, for instance, selling turntables and software at the the RockShop for three years.
“That's invaluable experience for troubleshooting when using music technology in the classroom, so I got more and more involved in supporting teachers running professional development.”
Dr Emo reached a point in his career where he decided he wanted to become a deputy principal, which meant he needed to do postgraduate study.
He received a PPTA scholarship and began working on his Master’s degree at Victoria University in 2018, studying by distance from his home in Nelson.
“I was ticking off the things that I thought as a teacher, I needed to learn about, like learning about assessment, learning about evaluation, learning about designing professional development. I did those through papers and also a small research project.”
Towards the end of that year, his supervisors Dr Vicki Thorpe and Dr Louise Starkey, Associate Dean (Academic), Te Whānau o Ako Pai—Wellington Faculty of Education, suggested he continue his research with a PhD. He was granted a doctoral scholarship and kept studying.
“My journey is trying to figure out how I can best support teachers because if I'm in a school, I can teach 400 or 500 kids in a year perhaps.
“But the opportunity to support teachers has a wider impact and supporting them with curriculum and assessment and all those things, so that's where my investigation was focused for my PhD.”
Dr Emo says he felt well supported by the University as a distance student.
“Someone gave me the wise advice when I was doing my Master’s, that the third Wednesday of every month the Faculty of Graduate Research offers face to face workshops, and they said go to as many of those as you can. So that's what I was doing every month.
“I was flying to Wellington for the day or two days, sometimes managing to align it with some professional development I was leading and I'd go to all of those workshops and that just transformed my study because I was a pretty average student in my undergraduate degree.”
The focus of his PhD was on what teacher’s are currently doing in the classroom with digital technology, and what informs that work. What are the barriers, and what are their influences?
After years of facilating workshops throughout the country Dr Emo was well connected and had a few ideas, but he needed actual data. He collected it through a survey and teacher interviews to perform a rigorous, robust analysis of what is happening with secondary school music education. His response rate was an estimated 40% of all secondary school music teachers
“An interesting finding was that age or teacher experience have no indication on their use of digital technology or if they think it's even valuable.
“So the idea of the digital native myth is totally dispelled—it already has been dispelled, but it's still out there.
“If a teacher believed that digital technology was really important for them to teach music, that it’s infused in music and you can't take it away from music education, they're gonna do the best that they could with what they have.
“Even if they self-report really low skills or self-efficacy with using digital technology, they will still do it and it's really encouraging that you do the best that you can and and you'll figure it out.”
Throughout his PhD journey he was involved with the University as a teaching fellow and visiting lecturer.
During this time, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Fortunately Dr Emo was comfortable in the digital technology space, and was already working by distance. However, it was a busy time, and he paused his PhD while he taught nearly thirty workshops over three weeks helping teachers bring their teaching online.
He says his number one piece of advice for anyone doing a Master’s or PhD is to go to the Faculty of Graduate Research workshops, including ethics and research proposals. He went to a workshop in his first year of his PhD about the oral defence, and was able to pull up his notes when it came time to do his defence 4 years later.
“I still refer back to some of those graduate workshops notes, like the one with a visiting academic who came from Australia about writing good abstracts and getting them in journals. That was gold. Without that I would have written badly and it would have taken longer.”
Being a distance student worked well for Dr Emo, although he didn't have that office camaraderie that other students and colleagues have. He says he was well supported and that the Faculty of Education “was amazing”.
Learn more about studying Education at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.