Concepciones y pra´cticas de los directores de coro: el ensayo coral como escenario de enseñanza-aprendizaje

Abstract

Abstract The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to explore the choral rehearsal as a musical learning environment by studying the role of the choir's director as a learning agent. It is from this objective that we intend to analyse if some of the resources and strategies that are specifically promoted during the choral rehearsal can be effective in any of the different dimensions of musical learning. The first part of the document includes a theoretical revision that allows us to link the choral phenomenon as a musical, social and historical fact with the distinctive features that make it become a learning environment. The first chapter describes the choral activity by exploring the history of vocal groups, mainly in Europe and in Spain along the XIX and XX centuries as well as during the beginnings of the XXI century. The second chapter gives us the context of choral rehearsal as a teaching-learning scenario, and relates it to the study of formal, no formal and informal contexts. At the same time, we thoroughly analyse the two roles of the choral director: as a performer and as a teacher. The third chapter introduces the theoretical framework for the research by including an analysis on implicit concepts about the teaching-learning process. The revision of different approaches led us to those that consider concepts as implicit theories and focus on music teaching-learning processes. Along chapter four, concepts as external representations, external representation systems and internal representations are studied, and publications about music representations, more specifically related to the different types of representations used in choral rehearsal are revised. After presenting the general objectives, the Empirical Study is introduced. This is focused on two studies that are summarized below: 4 The first study analyses the answers of 41 choir directors classified in three dichotomous conditions: teacher/not teacher, children's choir/adult's choir and an experience that goes longer or shorter than 10 years. By analysing these categories, we explore what kind of learning is promoted by directors during the rehearsal (results) and how (processes and conditions) they do it, including its different types and frequencies. Secondly, directors are profiled by using clusters according to their ideas about implicit theories, and as a result three profiles were obtained: (-traditional/direct- focused on reading, -direct/interpretative-, and focused on learning and representation -interpretative/constructivist). Lastly, the possible relation between these profiles and each learning category was analysed. The learning categories were found according to the dichotomous conditions of directors using Chi squared and other descriptive statistics as well as both, parametric and no-parametric analysis. In chapter six, which compiles the Second Study, the practice of two different adolescents' choir directors is thoroughly analysed. Both are teachers who participated in the First Study and belong respectively to the Focused on reading (direct/interpretative) and the Focused on learning and representation (interpretative/constructivist) profiles. An in-depth analysis of the first of three recorded and transcribed rehearsals from each director was made. These analyses were divided in three phases: Macroanalyses 1 and 2, which include the description and qualitative comparison of the rehearsal of each participant beginning with the descriptive statistics; and, the Microanalysis of one representative episode of the rehearsal from each of them. These analyses resulted in two profiles: direct-interpretative and constructivist which allowed us to carefully describe the profiles that were found. It also provided with a greater diversity of categories and subcategories regarding processes and conditions (the "how" dimension of learning) than the ones mentioned in Study 1. It was also possible to compare directors' concepts and practice, contrasting what they say with what they do. This thesis is ended with a General Conclusions chapter and the findings discussion which are organized as follows: first, a revision of the tool used for analysing the categories (the Instrumental Practice Analysis System) and its adaptation to the choral context. Then, and from the conclusions of the two empirical studies, the general implications of these results for the choral rehearsal and the general musical learning are discussed. Lastly, some limitations of this doctoral thesis are considered, as well as various possible future research projects.