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Thankfully, the editors of Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom (2016), Ajay Heble and Mark Laver, along with a host of other contributors, have not overlooked these issues. Pedagogies that fail to encourage critical engagement contribute to students who may never find the passion necessary to succeed in attaining improvisational fluency, to retention rates for schools that remain low, and to teachers at the mercy of government cutbacks as a result of their program's stagnant performance. Ultimately, the result is an educational gap that destabilizes students' critical engagement with social issues and epistemologies. Students get funnelled into programs constructed exclusively to fill ready-made niches-curricula and pedagogy created by upper management bureaucracy that promotes the sustainability of the university's best interests. Improvisation, when it appears in academic environments, appears too often as part of a compartmentalized curricula emerging from a government-delegated neoliberal compliance that often overlooks the crucial and historical socio- political turmoil and socio-cultural norms that originally gave rise to many improvisational practices. Music teachers teaching improvisation can often lean heavily on stagnant pedagogies that suffer from their failure to incorporate consideration of music's social dimensions. This leads all too often to discussions that seldom take into account the collaborative and social practices, the belief systems, and the historical contexts that shape music making. de Lima When I consider the zeitgeist of contemporary music education in North America, I can't help but feel that the tendency to prioritize the creative object over the creative act remains the approach of most music teachers. The final result of the project is a syllabus for conducting the course, which is known as A Cappella Ear Training, including excerpts from the author’s arrangements and instructions for delivering the course content. Throughout the project repertoire was arranged especially for each group in accordance with the desired learning outcomes. Data has been gathered regarding methods of ear training in current use in various jazz schools in Australia as well as surveying current theories of the importance of ear training in jazz education and the extant modes of delivery. Participating students were surveyed to gain insight into their thoughts about the effect that the musicianship skills gained during class had on their improvisation skills. At the core of the project is the idea that students consolidate their theoretical knowledge and link it with their aural skills when they use their voices in an ensemble, rather than relying on their instrumental skills. This project investigates the aural and musicianship skills of students enrolled in a Bachelor of Jazz Studies Course, with the ultimate goal of improving their improvisation skills. Keywords A cappella, ear training, harmony, improvisation, jazz, musicianship, theory. Analysis of the data confirmed that AET enabled the development of a theoretically informed practice whereby the participating students came to recognize concepts in practice and performance. Further interviews with some participants were conducted to ascertain the students’ perception of the AET approach. Students were observed throughout the course, with the author making field notes on the practice of the class session. The research used a qualitative approach, and drew on data generated through participant-observation and interview techniques. AET was used to test the author’s assumption that learning to sing in harmony with other voices and without recourse to the mechanics of any instrument would improve the ability of the students to internalize the theoretical information with which they were being presented in all areas of the course. Over three semesters, students participated in a method developed by the author known as “A cappella Ear Training” (AET). This study examined the ways in which singing in an a cappella harmony group affected the improvisational abilities of tertiary level jazz students.
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As jazz study has become an established branch of the tertiary music landscape, disquiet has arisen in some quarters about the “mechanical” way in which improvisation is taught.