Post date: Aug 08, 2016 2:51:18 PM
I've had an old laptop sitting around Dundee Drum Academy for a long while. The cable had broken on it, and then every other cable that I plugged into it ended up somehow breaking too. To cut a long story short, it hasn't been switched on for the last four or five years. Yesterday I decided to extract the hard drive to see what was on it, and aside from 16GB of music that may have been forever lost otherwise, one of the most interesting things I found were my old dissertations from when I studied music.
I've only skim-read through them and intend to have a more thorough read-through later. But I thought it would be interesting to post them here. I tried to post them as regular blog entries, but couldn't figure out why my pictures wouldn't work (although I was able to extract data from an old hard drive, I wouldn't say computer skills are a particular strength of mine), so I've saved them as PDF files and uploaded them at the bottom of this page instead. Once I've re-read them I'll have another blog post commenting about these dissertations and what I might have done differently with them.Â
While I was studying music I had decided that teaching was really what I wanted to do with music, so naturally the topics are on music education. Dissertation 1 compares the teaching methods of Suzuki, Kodaly and the Orff Schulwerk, while dissertation 2 focused on how well schools in Scotland prepare students for further education in music. Both of them were really interesting topics and I enjoyed reading, researching and writing about them. Hopefully you'll find it interesting or useful to have here.
Please note - the images from dissertation 2 are missing. Mainly just a collection of figures and charts, and you'll still follow what's going on without them.