The power of collaborative working – building a community of inquiry in singing

In Part 9 of the AOTOS Keynote on Teaching Singing in the 2nd Decade of the 21st Century, Dr Gillyanne Kayes offers another solution to the problems inherent in the Master-Apprentice model – the power of Collaborative Working.

“Collaborative working. I’ve got to say I’m personally grateful that very early on in my career I was confronted with large groups of actors. And I can tell you that those Oxbridge graduates took no prisoners. It taught me to dig into the why of what I was teaching. And I still love to work with groups.

Another thing that I gained very early on was the power of cross-disciplinary and collaborative teaching. It was actively encouraged at my first drama school job in the 1980s. and I still love to team-teach, and our team will grow further. And without question those experiences have shaped me to be the vocal educator I am today.

Kudos to AOTOS, I know you’ve been working hard on this, doing many of the things you can see on this slide. And it’s something we foster again on our own programme, and it allows the teachers taking the programme to change the shape of it. So what we’re creating is a true community of enquiry, and that’s what education is.”

 

Gillyanne’s Further Reflections

Working with groups of up to 30 people forced me to re-evaluate my own pre-conceptions about how we learn and then teach singing. The closest I’d ever got to working in a group was in a Lieder class setting run by one of my teachers – Ilse Wolf. Ilse refused to call these sessions ‘masterclasses’ and the idea was that we would all learn from watching and listening. That said, it was only Ilse, or the collaborative pianist Diana Wright, who coached and gave feedback.

Many years later, when Jeremy and I were working at the Queensland Conservatorium back in 2019, Irene Barlett introduced us to Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process™, a process developed to assist dancers in development of their performance. It was fascinating to watch Irene facilitating this process with singers on the Jazz course at the Con. In this way, everyone learns – it is not just about the ‘teacher’ and the one student.

Some of you will know that Jeremy and I flip the traditional masterclass model by inviting the audience to ask us why we did what we did with each singer, as well as to share what they heard and saw, and what they might have prioritised. We call these sessions More Than A Masterclass and consider it a collaborative experience with both singers and audience.

As a voice education company we have had both good and bad experiences of collaboration! It took us a while to spot the people who were genuine collaborators – not wanting to ride on our reputation, and who had something special of their own to offer. Crucially, you need to assess whether your collabs are with someone at the appropriate level, and to have a formal contract. Without a formal agreement, misery can ensue. Just because someone is a friend or colleague does not mean that you do not need that contract.

Some highly successful collabs that we have had are with Lisa Perks (who organised the first important leg of our 2019 Australian Tour and the first of the follow-up trainings online in 2020); Oren Boder of RayVox (SOVT Pop-ups 1 and 2 in our Learning Lounge Deep Dive); our Associate Trainer Anne Leatherland (Practical Phonetics Pop-up) and Specialist SLT Carrie Garrett (My Singer Has a Voice Problem).

And a final thing that brings us joy – seeing our own Registered Teachers beginning to collaborate with each other in workshops and course creation.

 

Have you been aware of a shift in vocal education and singing training to a more collaborative working arena?

What do you think the benefits of cross-disciplinary teaching might be for you and for your students?

What is a community of inquiry and how might it work?

 

Click here for part 8 of Gillyanne’s AOTOS Keynote – Walking alongside: Client-centred singing teaching

Click here for part 10 of Gillyanne’s AOTOS Keynote – Singing Teaching is an Unregulated Profession: Is that a good thing?

 

Liz Lerman useful links:
https://lizlerman.com/critical-response-process/
https://lizlerman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Critical-Response-Process-in-Brief_CRP-one-pager_updated-2020_03_24.pdf

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