Inside Eight Musical Futures Classrooms: What I Learned

Abstract

This article describes how I, an American music teacher educator, visited the classrooms of eight Musical Futures Champion Teachers in the United Kingdom and observed their teaching with a focus on informal music learning and nonformal teaching. Musical Futures, a professional development organization in the UK, is the original organization that implemented Lucy Green’s research on informal music learning and moved it into the music classroom. Through observation of these Musical Futures teachers’ classes, I understood what informal learning and nonformal teaching currently look like in practice and how they are implemented. I witnessed how Green’s work directly impacts their teaching philosophies, the processes and pedagogies they implement, and the resources they employ in the classroom.