Getting started in postgraduate study in the Birmingham School of Media

What is an MA? What does study at MA level entail? What kind of expectations do participants have of MA-level study? What is the particular experience of studying in the Birmingham School of Media?

The aim of this blog-post, and those that come after it, is to answer some of these questions by capturing the learning experience of students on the MA Music Industries award as it commences its first semester.

In postgraduate courses at the School of Media, the teaching team often begins with an emphasis on the interactivity of classes and our sense of these encounters as a prompt and reference point for collaborative work between staff and students. This is an approach that is distinct from viewing classes - as some still do - as a place where students simply soak up information transmitted by lecturers. Whether conducted face-to-face in a classroom, at the university or online, or offsite, taught classes are but one of the places where learning takes place. We would argue in fact that classrooms are not even the most important site of learning. In addition there are tutorials, directed study and above all independent study.

One approach to beginning learning and establishing a group with a collaborative ethos is to get a sense each other as individuals. We began our first class this week with introductions from the teaching staff – Tim Wall, Paul Long and Andrew Dubber. If they really want to, readers of this blog will be able to find out more about us as individuals online. Of course, that’s the first trick for readers and the students themselves, we won’t tell you everything you need to know about us.  As with the study of the music industries, where we are still learning too, if you do wish to know more, you will have to do a bit of exploring elsewhere.

Welcoming the students

In due course, student participants will introduce themselves here as they take on the authorship and ownership of the site. This will be useful in giving a sense of the variety of perspectives involved in MA learning and those individual and independent paths that students take through their study (we feel that one size does not fit all). So, for the moment, say hello to those who started on this award on Monday (from left): Craig, Rich, Ruth and Yinca. In subsequent weeks and months, subscribers to this site will find out more about them, their thoughts, activities and how they progress in their studies. Hopefully, we’ll also discover something of the motives that these individuals have for studying at BCU and the degree to which their expectations have been met and challenged.

How the MA Music Industries works

Understanding the nature of an MA is sometimes confusing. This confusion is sometimes (although not necessarily) exacerbated by the language employed by university bureaucracy, pedagogical phraseology and the sense that the individual has of their position while participating in the cut and thrust of classes and individual study. For this reason we always seek to ensure that everyone understands the nature of the undertaking and the requirements of study as we proceed.

Very simply, there are three stages to MA study and credit is accrued at each one. The first two are the certificate and diploma stages. These comprise the taught part of the degree in MA Music Industries. The final part is the Master’s stage and which involves the production of either a piece of original research in the form of a dissertation or a production project – aiming at the award ‘by practice’.

This is how the MA Music Industries looks in the form of a diagram:

MA Music Industry students who commenced full-time study this week are taking two modules: Popular Music as Culture and Enterprise. The latter is a module taught by Annette Naudin who leads MA Creative Enterprise and where students from across practice-based awards will work together. Part-timers who started today will take the first module and study with Annette in a subsequent semester.

Each of these modules has significant time devoted to what is called Personal Development Planning – PDP. We’ll write more about this as the course goes on but will note for now that this is one means by which students will map the direction of their study, and explore how to make best use of it in realizing their personal ambitions for the development of their careers and personal attributes.

While we pay attention to individual direction, the various modules and PDP thread, which comprise the MA Music Industries, have a collective set of aims, which are to:

• provide an appropriate range and depth of theoretical and professional knowledge to enable students to understand the key issues and challenges within the music industries;

• create challenging simulations of professional practice in which students can work in music industry environments, and especially interactive and online media;

• ensure that students engage with academic and professional debates, and evaluate the current state of academic knowledge, professional practice, and their own scholarly work;

• encourage students to become reflexive music industry workers, with a commitment to continuing professional practice.

These aims are evaluated against a series of outcomes that express those qualities which successful students have developed in their studies. We seek to test the degree of success in students through the tasks that they engage in on the modules and the various types of assessed work they complete.

In total, the work students do involves a ‘mapping’ of theoretical approaches to understanding music industries, and the professional practices in music culture, along with current intellectual challenges, and scholarly and professional techniques. Students work independently and in teams to systematically produce music-based enterprises and cultural products, developing strategies for innovation and problems solving by applying the traditions of research and enquiry they learn about. The work they do is based on a critical evaluation of professional practice in music industries and in current scholarship. Overall, the aims is that the conclusions and implications of this work can be communicated to specialist and non-specialist audiences in order that graduates will be best placed to continue to develop knowledge and contribute understanding and skill in music industry practice.

As this blog develops, the things students will tell you about their experience and the work that they post here and on their own sites will illustrate these outcomes.

The emphasis on this award, as in all MA study in the Birmingham School of Media is on the development of independence as scholars and practitioners. Students seek to make original contributions to knowledge or production which at the forefront of the field in dealing with current problems in the industry, or in academic study, offering intellectual and practical solutions to current challenges.

While the distinction between the two may appear to be pronounced, in our approach at BCU, we work on a model that sees a continuum between theory and practice. This does not necessarily reduce theory to pragmatic application nor over elevate production activity to abstraction. Rather, the two poles are in dialogue and in emphasizing the connection between the two kinds of activity we aim to produce students who are reflexive music industries professionals. This means WHEN they are successful, students will graduate equipped with the knowledge and ability to understand, analyze and react to situations in their working lives in the music industries.

The module: Music as Culture

Our approach to learning in each of the taught modules takes a structured form that balances seminars, interactive lectures and independent study. Independent study is in part ‘directed’ in that there are a set of tasks to complete each week that aim to ensure active learning and engagement with ideas. This idea of engagement is paramount in our approach – and this blog is one means of prompting and demonstrating it.

This may involve a degree of risk and exposure.

As one student who has never blogged asked of this practice today: ‘Are there any rules?’. Well there may be, in terms of the kinds of conventions that have accrued around blogging, but the underlying principle when faced with something new, or challenging is that we want people to ‘have a go’ and not to be afraid of failing or to be put off by incomplete knowledge. Failure can be a positive experience in educational development on the basis that learning from it will refine practices and test knowledge and understanding.

In due course, readers of this blog will be able to get a sense of the kinds of topics we engage with in this and other taught modules. Every week, students will be presented with some core ideas and techniques in their Monday classes and explore these ideas through tasks and by reading about key theories and research.

This first module then deals with the theoretical study of the music industries from a perspective that concentrates on the value of ‘music as culture’.

What do we mean by culture and why insist upon the idea that music is cultural? 

To take this approach makes a sometimes artificial and rhetorical point in order to concentrate on that quality which makes music industries (and those other creative industries), distinct from other types of production and the understanding of the commerce of the music business.

The music industries are involved in the production of symbolic goods. These goods – whether recordings, posters, live events, press reports or button badges, have meaning. This meaning is the most vital thing about the music industry for most of us involved in it – whether at the point of production or in consuming its goods. It is the symbolic value of music which we value and integrate into our lives and which in turn, inflect our own values and cultural perspectives. Of course, the economic aspects of the industries motives are indivisible from this cultural sense but over the course of this module we’ll attempt to make sense of the distinctions.

Students are expected to unpack this idea and explore it systematically through an engagement with some of the wealth of work on the subject over the next week. We’ll come back to evaluate this topic and their understanding of it in their posts next week.