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Formal and informal learning situations or practices vs formal and informal ways
of learning

Göran Folkestad

British Journal of Music Education / Volume 23 / Issue 02 / July 2006, pp 135 - 145
DOI: 10.1017/S0265051706006887, Published online: 29 June 2006

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0265051706006887

How to cite this article:

Göran Folkestad (2006). Formal and informal learning situations or practices vs formal and
informal ways of learning. British Journal of Music Education, 23, pp 135-145 doi:10.1017/
S0265051706006887

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 B. J. Music. Ed. 2006 23:2, 135–145 Copyright

C 2006 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0265051706006887

Formal and informal learning situations or practices vs formal

and informal ways of learning
G ö r a n F o l k e s t a d

Lund University, Malmö Academy of Music, Box 8203, S-200 41 Malmö, Sweden

Goran.Folkestad@mhm.lu.se

During the last decade there has been an awakening interest in considering not only
formalised learning situations within institutional settings, but also all the various forms
of informal musical learning practices outside schools. Informal musical learning outside
institutional settings has been shown to contribute to important knowledge and aspects of
music education. In this article, I will examine research studies which in different ways
focus on formal and informal learning situations and practices or formal and informal
ways of learning. I will consider the relationship between music education as praxis
(music pedagogy) and as research, and the relationship between these two facets of music
education and the surrounding society. I will identify four different ways of using and
defining formal and informal learning, respectively, either explicitly or implicitly, each one
focusing on different aspects of learning: (i) the situation, (ii) learning style, (iii) ownership,
and (iv) intentionality. Formal – informal should not be regarded as a dichotomy, but rather
as the two poles of a continuum; in most learning situations, both these aspects of learning
are in various degrees present and interacting. Music education researchers, in order to
contribute to the attainment of a multiplicity of learning styles and a cultural diversity in
music education, need to focus not only on the formal and informal musical learning in
Western societies and cultures, but also to include the full global range of musical learning
in popular, world and indigenous music in their studies.

The f ield of research in music education

Most research in music education has so far dealt with music training in institutional
settings, such as schools, and is accordingly based, either implicitly or explicitly, on the
assumption that musical learning results from a sequenced, methodical exposure to music
teaching within a formal setting. This definition is not only problematic, if at all true, but
might have serious consequences for how valid research questions are formulated, and for
the applicability of research results in developing both music teaching and music teacher
education programmes.
Consequently, in order to realise and understand the multidimensional character of
music teaching, musical learning should be considered in a much broader context than is
typical of much contemporary research literature.
However, during the last decade there has been an awakening interest in taking into
consideration not only the formalised learning situations within institutional settings, such

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as schools, but also all the various forms of learning that go on in informal musical learning
practices outside schools. This change in perspective is summarised by Folkestad (1998) as a
general shift in focus – from teaching to learning, and consequently from teacher to learner
(pupil). Thus, it also implies a shift of focus, from how to teach (teaching methods) and the
outcome of teaching in terms of results as seen from the teacher’s perspective, to what to
learn, the content of learning, and how to learn, the way of learning – in our case, how
various musical phenomena are perceived, experienced and expressed in musical activities
by the learner. This perspective on music education research presents the notion that the
great majority of musical learning takes place outside schools, in situations where there is
no teacher, and in which the intention of the activity is not to learn about music, but to
play music, listen to music, dance to music, or be together with music. Today, this is further
accentuated as a result of computers and new technology and all the musical activities on
the Internet, in which the global and the local interact in a dialectic way (Folkestad, 2002);
what Giddens (1991) calls glocal. Recent technological developments and the increasing
impact of the media mean that listening to and creating music constitutes a major and
integrated part of many young people’s lives. This means that a music teacher never meets
musically ignorant, untutored or uneducated pupils: on the contrary, when pupils come to
school they all possess a rich and in some ways sophisticated musical knowledge, acquired
from a variety of outside-school musical activities (Folkestad, 1998).
Applying a socio-cultural perspective on music education (Folkestad, 1996; 1998), the
question of whether or not to have, for example, popular music in school, is irrelevant:
popular music is already present in school, brought there by the students, and in many
cases also by the teachers, as part of their musical experience and knowledge (Folkestad,
2000). The issue is rather: how do we deal with it? Do we deny the fact that popular music
is an essential factor of the context of music teaching in school, or do we acknowledge
the students’ musical experiences and knowledge as a starting point for further musical
education? The same is true in deciding whether or not to pay attention to the fact that
a lot of musical knowledge is acquired outside school, in informal musical practices,
and that this is the learning experience of many students, regardless of whether they are
small children, adolescents or adult students in Schools of Music and teacher education
programmes.

Field of praxis – f ield of research

This shift of focus from teacher to learner, and this widened definition of the field of research
in music education has the following implication: while music education as a field of praxis
(music pedagogy) is defined as all kinds of formal musical teaching and institutionalised
learning settings, music education as a field of research must deal with all kinds of musical
learning, irrespective of where it takes place (or is situated), and of how and by whom it is
organised or initiated.
This also defines the relationship between the field of praxis (music teachers) and the
field of research (music education researchers) in that the role of the latter is not to ‘produce’
teaching methods, but to deliver research results to the praxis field – results by means of
which the professional teachers may plan, conduct and evaluate their music teaching. An
important strand in this relationship between researchers and practitioners, and with the

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rest of the surrounding society, is the mutually shared need for a continuous dialogue, and
also that research questions induced in the reflections of the praxis field become the object
of attraction to research.
My article will focus on this issue: the definitions of, and the relationship between, on
the one hand, formal and informal learning situations or practices, and on the other hand,
formal and informal ways of learning. My aim is to present an overview, to ‘draw a map’,
and thereby raise questions, rather than presenting unambiguous answers – questions to
which you, the reader might provide your own answers. Hopefully, it will give a more
nuanced and richly faceted view of the issue in question.

Studies on formal and informal learning

In Thomas Ziehe’s book from 1982, translated into Swedish in 1986, titled New Youth: on
Uncommon Learning Processes (my translation into English), Ziehe defines two types of
learning: (i) common and (ii) uncommon learning processes. Exemplifying the first category
he mentions conscious word exercises and music scale training when they take place in
school and at home. Uncommon learning is defined as learning that takes place without the
person being aware of it. Notable is that the main distinction between these two categories
is not where, but how the learning occurs.
In their 1988 study of three young rock bands, published in English as In Garageland,
Fornäs et al. (1995) found that the learning processes within this informal music learning
practice included more than musical aspects; for example, administrational and other
practical skills, such as management, as well as linguistic training and the formation of
personal identity. Accordingly, informal learning typically involves more than just the
core subject of learning, in this case the music; it features an integrated learning on a
more holistic level. These aspects are also illustrated in the intimate and longitudinal
ethnographic study of Berkaak and Ruud (1994), in which the researchers followed the
rock band Sunwheels for ten years, from their early days as an unknown teenage garage
band in Oslo, Norway, making their own electric guitars in the carpentry lessons in school,
up to their first professional tour to Los Angeles.
The topic of Lilliestam’s (1995) book – its main content published as an article in
1996 – is playing by ear and oral transmission. The descriptions of the essence of playing
by ear also provide good insights into the characteristics of learning by ear. Lilliestam
(1996) establishes that ‘folk and rock musicians are often suspicious of traditional musical
schooling’ (p. 201) and that there even seems to be an aversion to acknowledge that you
actually know music theory. He continues by stating that ‘it is part of “rock mythology”
and “authenticity” that you should not have musical schooling, but come “directly from
the street” and spontaneously play your heart out’ (p. 201). Neither, according to this
mythology, should you practise (or admit that you do) or reflect on your playing – ‘feeling’
is enough.
However, interestingly enough, in their descriptions of what they consider as typical of
playing by ear, the rock musicians frequently, and knowingly, refer to the scholarly way of
playing and learning music. Accordingly, an important notion is that today ‘there are both
rock musicians who are not familiar with Western musical theory and who cannot read
music, as well as those with a solid, traditional music schooling’ (Lilliestam, 1996: 197).

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The process of learning by ear is described by Lilliestam (1995, 1996) as consisting of

three major steps: listening, practising and performing. Performing in front of an audience
is thus an important part of the learning process – often neglected in formal music tuition.
Bob Dylan (2004) takes this so far as to describe how he never really practised or rehearsed
on his own when learning how to play and sing – a considerable part of formal music
training. Instead he did all his playing-practising-composing as an integrated activity in
public, performing on stage at the small clubs of Greenwich Village in New York City:
‘I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and
all the time. You can say I practiced in public and my whole life was becoming what I
practiced’ (p. 16).
Lilliestam (1996) establishes that ‘playing by ear or from notation are just different
musical behaviours and practices, each with its own advantages and drawbacks’ (p. 197).
He continues by suggesting that ‘the opposition between orality and literacy should not be
seen as an opposition between two conditions, as a dichotomy, but rather as a continuum
where cultures have different degrees (as well as types) of literacy’ (p. 197), and that today
it may be more relevant to speak of ‘oral or literate strategies, which we use for different
aims and which work more or less well for different purposes’ (p. 197).
In Folkestad’s (1996) three-year empirical study focusing on the processes and strategies
of computer-based creative music making by adolescents, one of the results was that
studying how to compose also is to study how to learn how to compose. In a situated
practice, like composing, the division between the artistic performance and how it is
learned becomes dissolved in the correlation of these aspects of the process; one cannot
exist without the other. A key analytical concept in the 1996 analysis and onwards is
affordances as described by Gibson (1986).
In Folkestad (1998), the theoretical conclusion of the 1996 study is further elaborated,
resulting in seeing musical learning as cultural practice. This involves that by participating
in a practice, one also learns the practice. Key analytical concepts in this theoretical
perspective, besides the already mentioned affordances (Gibson, 1986), are tools, artefacts
and mediation as described and defined by Vygotsky (1934/1986): ‘the creative music
making takes place in a process of interaction between the participants’ musical experience
and competence, their cultural practice, the tools, the instruments, and the instructions –
altogether forming the affordances in the creative situation’ (Folkestad, 2004: 88).
From this, a distinction between formal and informal ways of learning with respect
to intentionality is presented: towards what is the mind directed during the process of the
activity? In the formal learning situation, the minds of both the teacher and the students are
directed towards learning how to play music (learning how to make music), whereas in the
informal learning practice the mind is directed towards playing music (making music).
To take the example of creative music making, one might say that one formal practice,
the practice of composing – formal in the sense that the mind is directed towards the
creation of music – also involves the informal learning process of how to compose music.
This difference in intentionality is described by Saar (1999) as a distinction between a
pedagogical framing (i.e. learning how to play music) and an artistic/musical framing (i.e.
playing music), respectively. In his empirical study of various forms of leisure time musical
learning situations, Saar found that the formal and informal aspects were not static, but
rather shifted continuously.

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In her book In Search for Music Education, Jorgensen (1997) differentiates the concept
of education – which, as stated earlier, involves all kinds of learning – by defining five
categories or sub-concepts: schooling, training, eduction, socialisation and enculturation.
My interpretation of Jorgensen’s model is that the two first categories might be seen as
descriptions of formal learning situations. Schooling is the way of learning that often takes
place in schools, and in which the idea is that the student develops from novice to expert
as a result of a sequenced exposure to teaching. Special personal interest for the subject
matter is not seen as a presupposition for this type of learning. Training refers to the
methods or ways in which a person is taught or learns skills in a profession or practice.
The basic ingredients in this pedagogy are drills and instruction. In both of these categories
the teaching and learning is explicit in that there are teachers or instructors and students,
respectively.
Jorgensen’s last two categories might similarly be seen as descriptions of informal
learning: socialisation as a form of general and socially contextualised learning within a
specific domain or practice; for example how to become a violinist, a composer or a rock
musician. A key concept in describing these learning/‘teaching’ processes is the tradition
as the ‘hidden’, tacit or implicit teacher. Enculturation might be described as even more
general learning, as the outer circle of socialisation, and key concepts in describing these
processes are transmission, ‘the acquiring of culture through the passage of wisdom from
one generation to another’ (Jorgensen, 1997: 24), and acculturation, ‘the process whereby
isolated traditions or considerable blocs of custom are passed on by one human group to
another’ (Herskovits, 1938, as cited in Jorgensen, 1997: 26). Accordingly, it involves the
relationship between the practice and the surrounding society of which the practice is a
part. In these two categories learning is not explicit, but an unconscious (implicit) situated
learning, which occurs as a result of the doing-playing-practising.
The middle category, eduction, is interesting in the discussion of formal and informal
learning. The concept derives from the verb educe, which means bring forth in this
context; bringing forth and/or developing the capacities, abilities and aptitudes that already
potentially exist in the student. In this process the teacher is like a gardener, creating good
conditions for learning to take place. Here I see parallels to the ideas of Rousseau and
Dewey, and ‘reform pedagogics’ such as Freire, to give a few examples. Eduction is, as
I see it, the meeting place for formal and informal learning: formal in the sense that it
is organised and led by a teacher, but informal in the sense that the kind of learning
that is obtained and the ways in which this is achieved have much in common with the
characteristics of everyday learning outside school.
In her interview study of professional and non-professional rock musicians, aged
between 15 and 50, Green (2001) describes their musical learning strategies to become
rock musicians as an example of informal musical learning. She discusses the consequences
of her findings in relation to formal, institutionalised ways of music education. Interestingly
enough, and somewhat paradoxically, when these rock musicians teach others in
educational institutions, they use formal learning strategies in their teaching instead of
using the learning strategies they have once practised themselves: they rather teach in very
formal and traditional ways, in spite of their own personal informal musical training. These
rock musicians seem to have well established conceptions of what is ‘proper’ learning, or
rather what is ‘proper’ teaching. In other words, when starting to teach, the construction of

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teaching and the conception of what it means to be a teacher are so strong that even with
totally different personal experiences of learning music, these experiences give way to the
generally known construction of teaching. This confirms the conclusions of Olsson (1993)
in his study of the new music teacher education programme in Sweden that started in the
beginning of the 1970s. He argues that, in this respect, popular music has only entered
the formal institutional settings in terms of content. Formal and informal learning strategies
appear to act in a dialectic way, such that musicians of all genres combine formal and
informal learning strategies in their practice of musical learning, as shown, for example, by
Hultberg (2000) in her study of classical pianists’ approaches to music notation.
Ericsson’s (2002) study of how adolescents experience and talk about musical learning
moves in and between the two fields of musical learning in school and in leisure time. Two
main discourses were identified: the discourse of music and the discourse of the school
subject Music. The discourse of music is wide and embraces music in leisure time as well
as in school. It consists of listening and musicking, that is, all kinds of musical activities,
as described by Small (1998). The discourse of the school subject Music is narrow and
legitimised only through its position as a school subject. Interestingly enough, in the results
of Ericsson’s study it is also shown that the conception of learning described earlier as
eduction is valid in the eyes of the teenagers: value-related issues such as preference and
interpretation should in the greatest possible extent be left to the students, and the teacher
should (according to the adolescents) instead provide help to the students by giving them
tools for expression, such as training skills and providing a suitable milieu for musicking.
Ericsson found that what many of the students wanted in school was more of the kind of
musical activities and learning that takes place outside school, that is, the discourse of
the school subject Music to be replaced in school by the discourse of music. The discourse
of music (Ericsson, 2002) has bearing on what Folkestad (1996) called playing music –
musical framing in Saar’s (1999) terminology – whereas the focus of the discourse of
the school subject Music corresponds with learning how to play music and pedagogical
framing, respectively.
Two other Swedish studies are of particular interest in this context: Gullberg (2002) The
School way or the Garage way (my translation) and Johansson (2002) Can you hear what
they’re playing? Both of these studies explore the relationship between formal and informal
musical learning, and the results show that the ways in which the musicians/students had
learned music affected not only their learning styles in higher music education, but also
their musical preferences as displayed in their style of composition. This perceived conflict
between two musical worlds is also described by Sting (2003) in his book Broken Music,
the title itself reflecting this dilemma.
So far, the studies presented have dealt with musical learning, in and out of school,
within Western societies and cultures. However, in order to acknowledge the importance of
attaining a cultural diversity in music education by integrating world music and indigenous
music in the curriculum music, studies of musical learning in non-Western settings are
indispensable.
In this respect, Sæther’s (2003) study of the attitudes to music teaching and learning
among jalis in the Gambia has interesting findings. That which on a surface level, and from
the perspective and prejudice of Western music education, might seem to be an informal
practice, was in fact found to be a very formalised and ‘institutionalised’ way of knowledge

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formation and knowledge mediation. The title of Sæther’s thesis, The Oral University, refers
not only to this main result, but also to the notion that there is no causal relationship
between orality and informality, a connection which is, implicitly or explicitly, taken for
granted in much of the literature in this field. In Green’s (2001) study of rock musicians, for
example, written from the perspective of the Anglo-American music education tradition,
‘classical’, written music is the content of formal institutionalised music teaching, and
popular and orally transmitted music is regarded as being typical of informal out-of-school
activities.
As an example of informal musical learning, Söderman and Folkestad (2004) invest-
igated the music creation within two hip-hop groups, communes, in Sweden. The focus
was on the creative learning process and the meeting between music and lyrics (the texts).
The results show that in the creative process, which is collective in character, the lyrics are
superior to the music. Although the groups used the same ready-made music backgrounds,
the lyrics became varied and very personal. The text, which includes music and lyrics, is
cyclical and made in a collage way, and is full of intertextuality, with references to other
lyrics, movies and commercials.

Summary: formal – informal

In summary, the basic criteria of formal and informal learning situations found in the
literature might be briefly described as follows.
In the formal learning situation, the activity is sequenced beforehand. That is, it is
arranged and put into order by a ‘teacher’, who also leads and carries out the activity.
However, that person does not necessarily have to be a teacher in the formal sense, but a
person who takes on the task of organising and leading the learning activity, as, for example,
one of the musicians in a musical ensemble. Moreover, this position does not have to be
static, although this is commonly the case.
The informal learning situation is not sequenced beforehand; the activity steers the
way of working/playing/composing, and the process proceeds by the interaction of the
participants in the activity. It is also described as ‘self-chosen and voluntary learning’.
However, as learning can never be ‘voluntary’ in its true sense – it takes place whether or
not it is intended or wanted, as seen from the perspective presented in the opening of this
article, what is in view may rather be described as self-chosen and voluntary activity.
From the literature presented above, I have identified four different ways of using and
defining formal and informal learning, respectively, either explicitly or implicitly, each one
focusing on different aspects of learning.

1. The situation: where does learning take place? That is, formal and informal is used
as a way of pointing out the physical context in which learning takes place: inside or
outside institutional settings, such as schools. For example, ‘formally and informally
trained musicians’ in this respect is taken to mean trained in and out of school.
2. Learning style: as a way of describing the character, the nature and quality of the
learning process. In this respect, expressions such as ‘formally or informally educated
musicians’ rather refer to learning to play by written music or by ear.

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3. Ownership: who ‘owns’ the decisions of the activity; what to do as well as how, where
and when? This definition focuses on didactic teaching versus open and self-regulated
learning.
4. Intentionality: towards what is the mind directed: towards learning how to play or
towards playing (Folkestad, 1998)? Within a pedagogical or a musical framework
(Saar, 1999)?

These definitions are not contradictory, and it is possible to use more than one of them, but
it is very important to be explicit with the ways these terms are used in any specific writing
and context. My impression is that today, the distinction between these ways of using
‘formal’ and ‘informal’, is sometimes blurred. Accordingly, it is important to distinguish
between where the learning/activity takes place on the one hand, and the type and nature
of the learning process on the other hand, in order to be clear about whether formal and
informal, respectively, are used in describing formal and informal learning situations and
practices or formal and informal ways of learning.
One conclusion of the research presented above is that it is far too simplified, and
actually false, to say that formal learning only occurs in institutional settings and that
informal learning only occurs outside school. On the contrary, this static view has to be
replaced with a dynamic view in which what are described as formal and informal learning
styles are aspects of the phenomenon of learning, regardless of where it takes place.
Used as an analytic tool, what characterises most learning situations is the instant switch
between these learning styles and the dialectic interaction between them. Accordingly,
the distinction between formal and informal learning should not be seen as primarily
physical; formal learning as equivalent to learning in school versus informal learning as a
description of learning outside school. It is rather a question of whether the intentionality
of the individuals is directed towards music making, or towards learning about music, and
of whether the learning situation is formalised in the sense that someone has taken on the
role of being ‘the teacher’, thereby defining the others as ‘students’.
It is also a misconception and a prejudice that the content of formal musical learning
is synonymous with Western classical music learned from sheets of music, and that the
content of informal musical learning is restricted to popular music transmitted by ear. Since
what is learned and how it is learned are interconnected, it is not only the choice of
content, such as rock music, that becomes an important part in the shaping of an identity
(and therefore an important part of music teaching as well), but also, and to a larger extent,
the ways in which the music is approached. In other words, the most important issue might
not be the content as such, but the approach to music that the content mediates.
Formal and informal ways of learning are aspects in most educational situations, in
and out of school, and one interesting way of analysing musical activities is to observe and
describe the switch between the formal and informal ways of approaching learning.

‘Informal teaching’ – ‘informal interviews’

Having established that learning, and the learning situation, can be both formal and
informal, it is important to clarify that this is not the case with teaching: teaching can
never be carried out using ‘informal teaching methods’. Teaching is always teaching, and

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in that sense always formal. As soon as someone teaches, as soon as somebody takes on the
role of being a teacher, then it is a formal learning situation. Even if there is no structure –
that is the structure. However, teachers might be able to create learning situations in which
informal learning processes can appear: to achieve that the pedagogical framing, which by
necessity has to be the point of departure of all classroom activities, is transformed by the
student into a musical framing. In this, it is the teacher’s responsibility to be planning and
executing a lesson in order to obtain an objective formulated beforehand. Consequently,
in this context I strongly question the sometimes implicitly normative value judgements
underlying some of the literature and discussions, where informal is equal to good, true or
authentic, while formal is equal to artificial, boring and bad.
Reverting to the relationship between the fields of praxis and research, I see a parallel
between, on the one hand, this discussion on formal and informal ways of learning and
teaching in pedagogical praxis, and, on the other hand, research methodology and the
discussion on (formal) interviews and (informal) conversations. In recent research literature,
referred to in methodological sections in papers and reports, descriptions of the interview as
being ‘not an interview, but ‘a conversation’ have started to appear. Taking such a statement
literally, it is, as I see it, false, and based on an unclear and unconscious view of research
as an activity and as a practice. A basic element in all research is that it is planned and
organised by the researcher, and the outcome of a research project should be the result of a
systematised investigation of a well-defined object/subject. This demand of systematization
is particularly true of the data collection and its various phases. It is the researcher who is
responsible for the planning and the choice of methods of the data collection in order to
optimise the possibilities of gaining as much important information as possible, the analysis
of which may cast light on the investigated phenomenon – as is the case with the teacher
planning and executing a lesson in order to obtain an objective formulated beforehand.
A conversation, on the other hand, is characterised by arising spontaneously, and the
participants have the same right and possibility to choose and change the subject of the
talking in any way and whenever they want. Moreover, no question or issue is one-sidedly
defined beforehand by any of the participants, which is the case when a researcher decides
the subject of the interview. Nor is the time limited for when the conversation is supposed
to be finished. In the research praxis, an interview is still a formal interview, even if the
researcher has chosen to give it the character of an informal conversation. But still, the
researcher has decided when to talk, where to talk, what to talk about, and which people
are to take part in the conversation. In parallel, as stated above, in the pedagogical praxis,
teaching is always teaching, even if the teacher has decided to let the activity take the
form and characteristics of an informal learning practice, as described, for example, when
discussing Jorgensen’s (1997) concept eduction.

Conclusion
The analysis of the presented research within this area suggests that formal – informal should
not be regarded as a dichotomy, but rather as the two poles of a continuum, and that in
most learning situations, both these aspects of learning are in various degrees present and
interacting in the learning process. This interaction between formal and informal learning,
is quite often described to take place in a ‘dialectic’ way. Here I see that both (i) a Hegelian

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definition (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and (ii) a more general definition (i.e. ‘two things
interacting with each other’) are in view.
Although the most commonly used definition in the reviewed literature seems to be the
latter, the Hegelian definition is not only applicable, but might also vigorously describe the
present situation in educational practices: out of the awareness of ‘the two musical worlds’ –
inside school (thesis) and outside school (antithesis) – the synthesis – new ways of musical
learning – is generated, both in formal settings and in informal practices, combining the
features and qualities of both learning styles described.
Why are these matters important in music education research? I suggest that the
developments and changes during recent decades might be summarised as follows: In
former days, the surrounding world was present in school as a reference and as something
one was taught about in order to cope with in the future. Today, the world around is present
in school as an alternative arena for knowledge formation and learning, with its own well-
developed and established forms. Moreover, it is also true that these forms and situations
are the ones that children meet first and become familiar with. This means that when they
start school, the ways in which learning is organised and approached there become the
alternative ways of gaining knowledge compared to what they have already experienced.
Echoring Ziehe’s 1986 concepts of ‘common’ and ‘uncommon’ ways of learning, for
today’s children, the ways of learning that occur outside school and which they adopt from
an early age by their interaction with music from all over the world, movies, video and
computer games, the Internet and so on are experienced as the ‘common’ ways of learning.
And, in relation to these, the ways of learning encountered by the children in school appear
as the ‘uncommon’ ways.
In order to contribute to the attainment of a multiplicity of learning styles and a cultural
diversity – in its true and full meaning – in music teaching practice, music education
researchers need to be not only doing all kinds of research in the classrooms, but also
to be where children and students encounter musical learning in all its various forms
outside schools. Moreover, as a result of the globalised world in which the local and the
global interact, particularly in the musical learning of young people, music education
researchers need to look beyond the formal and informal musical learning in Western
societies and cultures, to include the full global range of musical learning in popular, world
and indigenous musics in their studies.

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