Art and research are not contradictory!

Silke Kruse-Weber is a lecturer at the Kalaidos University of Music and was Professor of Instrumental and Vocal Pedagogy at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz until September 2022. From fall 2023, she will hold a deputy professorship in Augsburg. Her research interests include the development of instrumental and vocal pedagogy as a scientific discipline and the transfer of knowledge between theory and practice through reflective practice. Her new reflection tool Reflect! has just been published.

Silke, you have just published new music education research findings, can you briefly summarize them?
Thank you for asking! I am very happy about my publications right now. While theory and practice are often seen as opposites in music education, Reflect!, an observation and reflection tool for instrumental and vocal teaching, brings them together. A playful and artistic set of cards inspires a research-based attitude and a self-determined exchange about the quality of instrumental and vocal teaching and learning.

My study Reflective Practice in Innovative Music Schools is a knowledge transfer project in which music school teachers, the research team and university teachers are in close contact. Here, too, the focus is on the relationship between theory and practice, insofar as the latest developments from research are transferred into practice - e.g. the focus on student-centeredness or a
Opening up to different social forms of teaching.

So it's about reflecting on your own music education knowledge, how do you convey this to your students?
Reflection can be learned and does not have to be solitary, it works best as a collaborative practice where peers learn from each other. It is important to create time and space for reflection. In seminars and training courses, I often show excerpts from teaching videos and ask for a description of the situation. They are almost always evaluated instead. Descriptions without evaluation are difficult. Teachers like to focus on students' deficits. We consider what negative assessments do and find that learners often become defensive and lose their open willingness to learn.  

Which skills are crucial for reflecting on and expanding your own knowledge?
I think they are skills that build on each other: research, reflection and science. An inquiring attitude provides the basis for reflection. Reflective skills require curiosity, openness and empathy in order to be able to adopt new perspectives and penetrate an issue. They are expressed in differentiated questions. A scientific orientation is another basic competence. It allows you to make a plausible and coherent selection from findings and theories for a specific purpose. Scientific research, e.g. in Master's theses, is ultimately based on more rule-based work.

Are these skills also important for performance students?
Performance students in particular benefit from reflective practices! When practicing and making music, it is important to constantly develop new alternative actions. Stereotypical practicing is not efficient. Studies have shown that the more you deal with your own goals and evaluate practice processes, the more efficiently you practice. It is also important to be open in your own career. Professional fields are changing rapidly and musicians should be able to deal with complexity and unpredictability. Reflective practice can encourage change and adaptation to situations. This is exciting for every person, artist and educator.

How do the ability to reflect, curiosity and scientific thinking help us to be good artists or teachers?
Reflective practice is a key competence for good teaching, pedagogical action and successful creative practice. Today, we especially need musicians and
Educators who think critically, are responsible and flexible.

Scientific findings, on the other hand, are not directly transferable to the practice of teaching or playing. Every teaching situation and every music-making situation is social and therefore unpredictable. Scientific findings only provide one perspective on how practice can be illuminated.

Since you became a research lecturer, our students have been happy to take the otherwise often unpopular research course, and the quality of the Master's theses has increased - what is your secret?
This course is about getting students excited about research. For example, they learn to pose their own research questions and to conduct scientific research for them. They learn a certain type of reflection and appreciation with regard to the presentation of
scientific results, but also how to deal with the ideas and findings of a scientific community and how to learn from them. It is not uncommon for a scientific paper to open up new perspectives for students on where their education can take them. At the beginning of the course, students always ask themselves why they should learn how to write scientific papers. But I don't see that as a problem, but rather as an invitation to develop new perspectives.

Detailed information on the new releases can be found on this website: www.kruse-weber.com