Yeo, Seul Kee (2026) Hitting the Right Note: An Autoethnographic Investigation of a Secondary Music Teacher’s Negotiation of the Music Curriculum. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

The focus of contemporary music curriculum in secondary classrooms has shifted from traditional heritage and the canon to popular music. Consequently, the curricula that music teachers deliver and the meaning of music education vary across schools. Within this context, this inquiry explored my experiences as a secondary-school classroom music teacher, focusing on how I negotiated the Victorian music curriculum to engage Years 7 and 8 students in music education. In this inquiry, I am situated in the in-between: I am someone who learnt music by reading and writing music notations and playing Western classical music (traditional musical knowledge), yet enjoys playing jazz, gospel and popular music (contemporary musical knowledge). I am a migrant who speaks both Korean and English, yet I have not fully belonged to either Korean or Australian culture. I am a stranger who belongs to both worlds concurrently, yet not entirely to either. I am a teacher-researcher who approaches this inquiry as a centre of authority and a member of a cultural minority to examine power dynamics within secondary music classrooms. Therefore, my positionality of being in-between is the core of this inquiry. Following inspiration from Bullough’s (1998) argument that one must confront biography to understand educational events, I used a bricolage of autobiographical, narrative, and life-history approaches. Through retrospective autoethnographic writing, I immersed myself in personal narratives drawn from my memory and artefacts, such as teacher planners and exam or test templates I had created. To develop, analyse and interpret my personal narratives, I used Pinar’s (1994) currere method and Jackson and Mazzei’s (2011) notion of thinking with theory to challenge traditional forms of qualitative data analysis, such as themes and coding. Narrative analysis has been adopted to illustrate how my personal narratives emerged. This inquiry is grounded in the notion of critical pedagogy, affect theory, situated knowledge and intra-action. These theoretical frameworks are not applied sequentially but are read with my personal narratives simultaneously to produce new understanding. Significant insights produced throughout this thesis are that, firstly, the banking model of education is not solely a philosophical or abstract concept, but an embodied phenomenon that circulates through a learner’s body. Secondly, it also explains why Western classical music and traditional musical knowledge become legitimate knowledge in the context of secondary music education through selective tradition and affective economies. This shows that my experiences as a transnational music teacher, situated in the in-between, are not just personal stories but also enable curriculum negotiation through conscientisation. Lastly, this thesis argues that pedagogy is not just a choice made by teachers, but a phenomenon emerging from the entanglement of human and non-human elements (e.g., musical instruments, textbooks, classroom spaces, and school culture). This view provides a perspective on initial teacher education, shifting from teacher-making to teacher-becoming. This thesis does not close with traditional conclusions but remains open, inviting readers to stay with the trouble and to continue becoming, as this is never complete.

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