Liora Bresler on qualitative research methodology

I’m continuing my public-facing note taking on PhD prep reading with my great-grandmentor, Liora Bresler, and her book Beyond Methods: Lessons from the Arts to Qualitative Research. She and her co-authors ask: How in the heck are you supposed to evaluate music education? Or any kind of arts education? Or anything having to do with the arts at all?

Liora Bresler, my great-grandmentor

Bresler et al propose that we look to ethnography in general and ethnomusicology in particular, and learn from their best practices. Furthermore, we can use music itself as a research methodology for music education. I’ve been using music creation and remixing as a tool for doing education for a while now, but using music as a research methodology for education is a new and exciting idea for me.

Bresler’s book begins with an overture rather than in an introduction. (That makes me want to write a book in head-solos-head form, or verse-hook-breakdown form.) For Bresler, when you do qualitative research, you’re creating an experience. It’s more like art making than anything, score writing rather than score following. Bresler sees plenty of overlap between the skills of a good musician and those of a good qualitative researcher, especially around the practice of active listening.

Intent listening during interviews resembled, in its absorption and intimacy, musical listening (3).

As with music, there is no formal methodology that is adequate to the complexity of the task at hand.

Fresh perception and meaning making do not abide by goals, rules, and technical procedures. Their very nature defies prescription and methods (4).

Music education is impossible to study quantitatively. But then how do we control for bias and subjectivity?

The only way to release the control that subjectivity holds over us is to bring it to our awareness (6).

Qualitative research looks in three directions: at the object of research, at the researcher’s own interior, and at the audience. The first direction is a no-brainer. The second is necessary to manage the researcher’s subjectivity. The third is a crucial part of experience design. Researchers have to be as mindful of their audience as musicians do.

Tyler Denmead recommends that ethnographers learn from artists to be motivated by “a lust for not knowing.” In formal educational settings, we usually act as if answers to our questions exists, and that we just need to apply enough diligence to identify them. Research into educational institutions tends to follow the norms of those institutions.

Education research remains principally concerned with learning inside formal educational institutions, and these institutions largely frame teaching and learning as the cognitive-based transmission of disciplinary content (26).

That word “disciplinary” means something very different outside of the academic context, and maybe inside it too. Not for nothing did Michel Foucault explain schools as being modeled on 19th-century prisons. Knowledge is that which can be named, classified, measured, and compared. Not knowing is a problem to be solved.

Artists do need discipline, to follow an idea through to its conclusion. But the process of coming up with those ideas in the first place is necessarily undisciplined. Artists think through doing and don’t necessarily plan ahead, or know where the work is taking them–I certainly don’t. Artists value being lost, and qualitative researchers should too. Multiple meanings and semantic non-closure are to be desired. Being intentionally lost can keep ethnographers from just looking to confirm their pre-existing theories. We can’t bracket out messiness, complexity, or our own biases.

Bracketing is an attempt to be in the world in a way that is not clouded by one’s natural attitude, an attitude shaped through cultural mediation. It is a mysterious method and one now considered impossibly preoccupied with a privileged and unattainable vantage point. We now accept that our interpretations hinge upon our standpoints and histories, there is no escaping either, and the strength of our analysis hinges upon these standpoints and histories. Nonetheless, much of my understanding of the attempt to bracket is influenced by the imagery the word evokes: [] or {}. These brackets are walls (32).

Rather than trying to bracket our biases, we’d do best to begin by making a “theoretical confession” as per Paul Willis. And as we go about making observations, both artists and ethnographers need strategies for staying alert, and for making the familiar strange–so that we can then make the strange familiar.

Without a strict methodology to follow, qualitative researchers need to hone their improvisational abilities. Sven Bjerstedt quotes an earlier Bresler paper:

Given [their] fluid, unpredictable nature, improvised activities (which cannot be pinned down in the same way that fully scripted ones do) do not typically command the reverence traditionally allotted to “written” works of art… However, life itself, lived creatively and meaningfully, requires improvisation, distinguishing a life lived from a life endured. Both music and research involve the seeming contradiction of hard work that employs sophisticated skills and the playful spontaneous, responsive frame of mind that accommodates disciplined improvisation. It is disciplined improvisation that creates the interplay between script and exploration, scholarly tradition and innovation (33).

You don’t usually hear the word “playful” applied to good research methodology, but if we’re embracing the uncertain, improvisational playfulness is the right frame of mind. We also need a Buddhist awareness of the continually changing holistic nature of experience. Koji Matsunobu observes, philosophically:

Narratives researchers emphasize the temporality, fluidity and continuity of human experience… Qualitative research is an act of giving meaning to the stream of time that otherwise ceases… The researcher spends a significant amount of time observing, participating in, and analysing events from etic and emic perspectives (66).

Translating that last bit into English: “etic” is what’s going on in the researcher’s head; “emic” is in the subjects’ heads. Matsunobu has some more Eastern wisdom for us:

Our information-driven minds desire to seek out more information. Yet, we seldom cultivate ourselves to appreciate silence as listeners and scholars… Being trained musically in a culture where musical training involves appreciating silence may help to develop sensitivity to sound and silence in human interactions (71).

Asking researchers to be able to wrap their heads around human behavior in all its complexity and flux is asking a lot. Still, that’s what’s needed, says Bruno Nettl.

[D]escribing the “complex whole”—even if transferred to the microcosm of musical culture—is not an easy task, to put it mildly, and no one really accomplishes it completely, but the concept of ethnography grew out of the insistence that all of the domains of a culture are interrelated, and so when you are in the “field” doing the “ethnography” part of your task, you are hopefully working within this broad perspective, even when you are listening to one song or just taking a flute lesson (78).

How can any writer encompass the complex whole of anything? One strategy is to follow Anthony Seeger and use music as a window onto, well, everything.

Anthony Seeger’s book on the Suyá (Why Suyá Sing), published in 1988, has in the 1990s been cited perhaps more than any other work from this literature of book-length musical ethnographies, in large measure because he made a felicitous distinction between Merriam’s “anthropology of music” and the concept of “musical anthropology,” which suggests an even greater degree of integration, insisting that music not only results from the guiding principles of a culture but is itself one of the forces that determine the character of a culture (85).

Eva Sæther compares the work of a good ethnographer to that of a good classroom teacher. In both fields, the really valuable moments of insight can come from unexpected departures from the plan. Improvisation is key for teaching because you want to treat “didactical irritations” as opportunities.

To be able to be astonished, to capture the meaningful pedagogical moments, resembles the duties of the researcher, conducting participating observation in the field. To have tools for action in praxis demands experiences in praxis. To be able to analyse and understand what could be “exemplar actions”, based on didactical and theoretical readiness. Pedagogical moments might occur with the help of didactic irritations, situations when the teacher has to leave the pre-planned lesson structure. If the teacher possesses the willingness and ability to profit from such moments, the problem can be exploited so that it helps develop the teaching, by providing insights on expectations and competences in the student group. The point about didactic irritations is that they can be turned into positive resources—provided that teachers and/or researchers are trained in the art of being in-between, and in inviting astonishment (93).

Sæther loves alliteration. She praises “resonant” researchers as being “responsible, rigorous, respectful and resilient” (101).

Göran Folkestad echoes Denmead about the need for researchers to be transparent in their biases.

The praxis of music education, music teaching, must in one way or another be normative. That is, a teacher should have, indeed needs to have, an idea of what is good or bad about his or her teaching, and what is good or bad for the students. Music education researchers, however, must put this normativity in abeyance and adopt epoché, to use a term from phenomenology, in order to achieve a descriptive, analytical level. One of the tasks facing research in music education might thus be described as disclosing and exposing the prejudices or preconceptions that are present in contemporary discussions on music and music education (106).

Moving down from the meta level, Folkestad has some ideas about how to adapt music education for a world in which musical ignorance no longer exists.

As adults—having spent our childhood in what we thought was a new age, but in comparison with the impact of musical exposure of today was still a stone age—I think it is hard for us to fully understand the situation for today’s children, who right from the start interact with recorded music, television, DVD-movies, computer games and all the musical activities on the internet… [A]s music educators we never meet musically ignorant, uneducated children and students. On the contrary, when pupils come to school they all possess a rich and in some ways sophisticated musical knowledge, acquired from a variety of outside-school musical activities (107).

How can we expect kids to be interested in “Hot Cross Buns” when they’re awake to a bigger universe? How do we make sure classroom music lives in that bigger universe, rather than trying to keep itself walled off? Alex Ruthmann likes to quote Steve Dillon: wherever there is music is an opportunity for music education. And where is music? Everywhere! Folkestad agrees.

[T]he great majority of musical learning takes place outside schools, in situations where there is no teacher, and in which the intention of the activity is not to learn about music, but to play music, listen to music, dance to music, or just be together with music (108).

The question of whether or not to have pop music in school is academic, since it’s already present in the musical experience and knowledge of the kids (not to mention in the teachers.) How do we present “art” music as being part of the same continuum as the music that kids already like? It’s an issue of cultural authenticity. Kids like classical music fine. They just don’t like the culture of classical music.

My experience as a music educator is that, on the one hand, students might be negative to “classical music” when it is presented as classical music, but on the other hand, when listened to as film and TV music, in computer games, etc., they seem to be well acquainted with this music, in particular the orchestral music of the 19th and 20th century. In other words, though students might express negative attitudes towards classical music as a concept, they can at the same time be very familiar with, and appreciative of the same music as a sonic experience (109).

Folkestad has done a lot of research into how hip-hop musicians learn. His work confirms my own anecdotal observations that in the areas of musical expertise favored by hip-hop, the kids are usually way more sophisticated than their teachers. He quotes one of his research subjects as saying that the education system isn’t educated enough to educate the kids. I was visiting a Brooklyn public school a few months ago, and saw a visiting musician from the New York Philharmonic teaching a Finnish folk song to a roomful of black and Latino sixth graders. They were polite, but it was painful watching this lady didactically explain a rudimentary waltz to kids immersed in hip-hop, salsa, and other advanced rhythmic traditions. Folkestad employs a lot of these kinds of autobiographical narratives to shed light on bigger issues, so that’s validating for me.

Academic culture frowns on the first person in scholarly writing. Betsy Hearne has been there.

On several occasions, editors or publishers have asked me to replace the active voice with the passive; in other words, get rid of “I.” Yet an omniscient phrase like “It was observed” or “the researcher observed” is in no way superior to the more clearly identified “I/we observed.” In addition to strained language, the effect is to eliminate self from the work, implying an omnipotent other. This is (I believe!) partly because academics are suspicious of the personal, the emotional, the inner aspects of knowledge in relation to the impersonal, the material, the outer aspects of knowledge. Theoretically, a neutral stance combats “confirmation bias.” Yet the inside and outside of knowledge are omnipresent and are both valuable when recognized as interactive elements based on the researcher’s combination of evidence (factual, statistical, textual, documentary) and insight (selection, perception, interpretation, conclusion). In fact, the passive voice often favored in academic writing—even in qualitative research—camouflages an active mindset, a viewpoint. All research tells a story. This assumes a definition of stories as a broad spectrum, including scientific, social, and artistic, as well as literary. The question is, what kind of story, whose story, how has it been told? Who and what have been emphasized or left out? How do we recognize and honor both the subjective and objective elements that affect (and effect) research decisions (156)?

In qualitative research, as in creative practice, there is no neutrality.