Saville Kushner
1991

£5.50 + p&p, 104 pp
ISBN 978 0 903319 52 2
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What do children think about music and musicians? What do they think is educational about working with professional musicians? How do we go about finding out?

Performing musicians and schools: the combination is compelling and full of promise for the musicians, teachers and children. We all would have little difficulty in thinking how the combination might best be exploited – and this would probably include developing creativity, broadening access to the arts, offering a rare resource to schools, professional reform of the music profession or the professional development of teachers. These are adult ways of thinking about things and they are, understandably, positive and undeniably wholesome.

But the realities of interactions between professional musicians and children turn out to be more complex; the likely ‘effects’ and promises far-reaching and challenging – especially when considered from the point of view of children.

Saville Kushner is Director of the Centre for Research in Education and Democracy at the University of the West of England, Bristol and has recently been appointed Regional Adviser (Latin America/Caribbean) on monitoring and evaluation for UNICEF. He is a theorist and practitioner of programme and policy evaluation and a member of the UK Evaluation Society Executive Council. He is a specialist in case study and has conducted evaluation commissions and consultancies in many areas of professional action including schooling, policing, the performing arts, health service and social work. For many years he worked at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia and he has been the author of a number of major case studies of professional organisations and programmes of innovation.