Methodology and Research Design

The remainder of this chapter outlines how I enacted to the framework above to investigate the research questions:

1. What do jazz educators see as the basis of achievement in playing jazz? 2. How do jazz educators believe playing jazz can be taught and learnt?

3. What do jazz educators teach, and what are the potential affordances and implications of their pedagogic practices for knowledge-building and cultivating knowers?

The research involved a staged data gathering comprising first documentary analysis of beliefs expressed in a corpus of literature from the field of jazz education and, second, illustrative case studies of the beliefs and pedagogic practices of three jazz educators teaching at a summer jazz camp for young people.

In designing the research, a qualitative approach was ideally suited to addressing the research questions and the substantive focus. The study looks at practices and beliefs in a little-researched social field of practice, examining a very small sample of teachers in depth and in detail. That relatively little is known about the pedagogic practices of jazz educators, and analysis of public discourse about jazz education using specialisation codes is new, gives this study an exploratory element, suggesting a qualitative approach to begin building knowledge of the field (Flick, 2014; Marshall & Rossman, 1989). Additionally, the focus of the research was on the perceptions and experiences of people, in the documentary analysis and teacher interviews, and on their practices and interactions in a naturalistic setting in the classroom observations, conditions which favour qualitative research (Sarantakos, 1993). Qualitative study is also suited to contexts, such as the lessons observed in this research, which are fluid and change over time (Cohen et al., 2007). For these reasons, an interpretive, qualitative approach was adopted as appropriate to the needs of the research questions and the focus. LCT provided the theoretical framework for data analysis. Chapter 2 revealed a diversity of specific contexts for jazz education and approaches to

time. This diversity and complexity make large-scale studies unfeasible in a resource- and time- limited project such as mine. Instead, small-scale but in-depth research of specific cases that capture richness and depth is better suited to the needs of this research. Such depth and detail are afforded by a case study approach (Yin, 1994) that can address the ‘interpretive, subjective dimensions of educational phenomena’ (Cohen & Manion, 1989, p. 124).

The analytical framework of LCT allows theorisation from the illustrative cases. In this second part of the chapter I outline selection, gathering, and analysis of data in each stage of the study.

3.7 Documentary Analysis

To explore the public face of jazz, the first stage of the research drew on a corpus of diverse documentary sources in the public domain involving characterisations of jazz (listed in Appendix B). Sources of these portrayals included interviews, discussions, criticism, biographies of jazz musicians, histories, commentaries, documentary and dramatic films, academic writing, trade and professional publications, blog posts, and other media and forums. Selection of the corpus was informed first by personal experience, my own cultivated gaze (Maton, 2014, p. 97) from two decades of work in the field as a teacher, and performer and the initial stages of reading around the thesis problem. From this experience I had an overview of the jazz education field, its key figures—performers, journalists, musicologists, historians, and educators—and its debates. From that starting point, sources were selected purposively using a form of ‘theoretical

sampling’ (Glaser & Strauss, 2017) in which, the beginnings of the corpus having been

established, ‘this data … provides a starting point for the empirical research and sets the agenda for its unfolding focus’ (Maton, 2005, pp. 65-66). I purposively selected sources from multiple areas, for instance journalistic writing and criticism in addition to the views of musicians. While aware of musicians’ concerns that their voices have often been left out of jazz scholarship (Monson, 1996), I recognised that the jazz community encompasses more than just performers (Berliner, 1994; Prouty, 2012) and to see the field’s public discourse necessitated casting a wider net. New sources were added to the corpus to the point of data redundancy or saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). Saturation of themes from multiple sources contributed to triangulation of the data (Flick, 1992) and afforded confidence that the significant rhetoric of the field had been

captured. Only discussions of jazz education were selected from analysis from within each source—the whole document in some cases, or parts of other documents.

3.7.1 Corpus: analysis of the corpus

Analysis of the corpus involved first thematic coding of the qualitative data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) followed by the development of a translation device (cf. Section 3.2.8) and analysis using specialisation codes. The first round of coding began with a large number of themes that

emerged from the data. Gradually these were refined by seeing overarching relationships between themes as I spent more time immersed in the data and moving between a close focus and broad overview to see details and larger patterns. Gradually I arrive at a more manageable set of descriptive themes (listed in Appendix C) that I interpreted as ‘rhetoric of the field’. The next stage of data analysis used specialisation codes to explore the organising principles underlying these diverse stances and practices by uncovering their underlying basis of

legitimation. Through prolonged immersion in this data and iterative movements between data and theory, I developed the translation device, a language to mediate between the concepts and their realisation in these data, that was shown in Table 3.1. Text discussing jazz education was analysed for strengths of epistemic relations and social relations and the specialisation codes generated formed the basis for discussion of the public face of jazz.

3.7.2 Historical enquiry into jazz musicians’ early musical education

During analysis of the corpus it became apparent that I also needed to investigate the early musical training of historical jazz musicians. To do this I read accounts of the lives and

experiences of 143 prominent musicians (listed in Appendix D), the number in the sample based on a method used by Ake (2012) who made a similar investigation into the biographies of 146 jazz musicians born after 1950. The main data sources were biographies, autobiographies, journalistic interviews, and oral histories. Where needed and available, historical school records and newspaper reports helped supplement or triangulate details. Selection of sources was

general, publicly-available anthologies of significant jazz musicians, published or online. Selection was also informed by my insider knowledge of the field.

My biographical research focused on significant jazz musicians almost all of whom were born before 1950. The objective was not a comprehensive survey of professional jazz musicians, but to offer sufficient disconfirming cases (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Patton, 2002) to conclude the belief in universal self-teaching among jazz greats to be greatly overstated and, then, to analyse that stance using specialisation codes and within the frame of public face/private face. I read the biographies for references to education, training, teaching, and learning during each musician’s childhood through young adulthood, often but not always stopping where the individual

commenced work as a professional performer, although some continued studying concurrently with work. Relevant parts of each biography were coded descriptively. Specialisation analysis was not conducted as what mattered for analysis of the public face of jazz was whether training was emphasised or downplayed in discourse. To see this, it was useful to know whether or not musicians had undertaken music education.