Essential Leanings: Reclaiming the Music-Making Paradigm

In March 2016, the minister of education invited several Portuguese personalities to join a working group whose main goal was to create a document that outlined the “profile for the 21st century student in the end of compulsory education.” This profile should be based, on the one side, on a humanistic understanding of the student, and on the other, on “The Future of Education and Skills 2030” (OCDE, 2018). With these ideas in mind, a group of committed individuals sought to develop a profile centered on the development of each student as a personal and social being, an autonomous citizen with initiative, who is responsible, creative, and has the capacity and desire to learn throughout life.

The document was released for public comment in early 2017 and published by the Ministry of Education later that same year. In what regards the document “Essential Learnings” (EL), it is important to highlight that, contrary to what had previously happened, teachers had an important word to say in this process. In fact, in 2016, the secretary of state for education, Joao Costa, asked the Portuguese teachers’ professional associations to participate in the process of defining a set of “essential learnings” in each curricular area, within a perspective of horizontal and vertical curricular articulation.

This request was justified by the need to focus on the capital contents of each subject, to give more time to deepen each topic within each subject matter, to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the curriculum, to promote greater student interaction, and to make teaching and learning processes more effective. A working group was therefore created that included APEM board of directors, and the Program of Aesthetic and Artistic Education of the ministry of education; the work was carried out jointly with other artistic areas to create “common learning organizers for artistic education,” that could be the base for the definition of the essential learning experiences within each artistic discipline. In what concerns music education, when this task was completed, the document was analyzed by a group of experts invited by APEM that included not only researchers but also music education teachers and primary teachers. The final version of the document was then sent to the ministry of education, disclosed in March for public discussion and published in 2018.

Although it is too soon to fully evaluate the consequences and impact of the implementation of this new legislation, for now it is possible to say that, despite the efforts of the government and of institutions such as APEM, the EL felt short of the expectations of those that created and published it. The problem seems to lie in the fact that the EL cohabit with the two older syllabuses from i99i(Ministerio da Educa^ao, 1991a and 1991b) that have been serving, for years now, and especially after 2011, as the foundation for the school textbooks that teachers use on a daily basis and that are at odds with the EL. Thus, these textbooks do not represent the document published in 2018, that is, as we previously saw, aligned with contemporary socio-cultural and humanistic perspectives, focused on musical competences and not on concepts.

This situation is the cause of many misunderstandings and confusions, with many teachers somehow navigating between the textbooks and both legal and curricular directives, having serious difficulties to articulate them. There is, therefore, the urgent need to develop research project in schools, involving teachers, students, and policy-makers to try to understand how this issue might be exceed, and how the EL might be fully used by teachers on their daily classroom work. Only then it will be possible to comprehensively discuss the benefits and shortcomings of this document and how music composition might be comprehensively developed in the context of this new legal normative.