Working Together Well: Amplifying Group Agency and Motivation in Higher Music Education

This chapter interrogates some of the foundational assumptions of student-centred learning environments (SCLEs), with a view to expanding conventional pedagogical models to account for the “distributive” agency of groups of learners assembled in a classroom. The intention is to identify how collegiate, collective forms of agency might be fostered between music performance students, and to encourage them to recognise how their individual study goals and motivations are modulated by the co-presence of their peers, and vice versa. In the first part, the author challenges the idea of subjective autonomy, which is shown to undergird SCLEs. It is argued that, by treating individual students as autonomous agents, with separately determined study goals, higher music educators risk defining SCLEs in an overly individualistic manner. Instead, it is proposed that learner groups be treated as distributive agential networks, through which the agencies of individual learners are intra-actively connected. This is outlined as a multi-dimensional network braiding together intrinsic, extrinsic and intratrinsic (i.e. motivation distributed between multiple learners) forms of motivation, thereby to sustain both individual and collective forms of agency. The author proposes that greater awareness of how motivation emerges across such multi-dimensional agential networks within the learning environment can enable student-teacher and student-student relationships to be established on a more flexible and equitable basis, so that inventive ways of working can be collectively imagined. It is argued that educators have an obligation to foster an ethic of care between their students, which involves reflecting on how existing identity constructs might inequitably encroach upon the learning potential of certain members of the group, and thus obstruct the emergence of intratrinsic motivation. It is proposed that this requires the adoption of transparent, collaborative pedagogical frameworks, so that everyone, teacher and students included, ...