ResearchWorks: Evaluating Music Therapy: Designing a meaningful and flexible protocol for evidencing impact
- 6pm
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- ResearchWorks
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- Free | Online
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Speakers: Cressida Lindsay & Karen Wise (Guildhall School of Music & Drama)
Guildhall School's Music Therapy Department has been providing community outreach music therapy to local schools and services since 2013. Although anecdotally the work is valued by partner organisations, it has not been formally evaluated. In common with much provision of this kind, it is highly individualized – for different institutions and for individual clients – as well as precarious, with continuity continually threatened. In particular, a funding crisis experienced in 2017 highlighted the need and the challenge of evidencing the effectiveness and value of music therapy, as well as a lack of available published and methodologically sound evaluation protocols and tools to support such evidence gathering.
This presentation will discuss the first part of a project to design and implement an evaluation protocol. We began with a Scoping Phase, exploring views of key stakeholders in order to guide us towards a set of principles and tools that are both meaningful and adaptable to a wide variety of settings. This phase was carried out with the Music Therapy Service at London East Alternative Provision (LEAP), a Pupil Referral Unit for secondary school pupils based in Stepney Green, by means of semi- structured interviews with pupils, parents, teachers, support staff, therapists and senior leaders. The presentation will summarise the findings of the interviews and the proposed evaluation tools which were chosen, adapted or designed in line with the themes and principles that emerged from the data. The next phase of the Evaluation Project will be outlined and there will be a discussion about how the evaluation tools can be adapted further for application to a wider range of educational establishments.
Speakers
Cressida graduated as a music therapist from GSMD in 2006 having studied French and Italian as an undergraduate at UCL. She went on to work in NHS secure and acute adult mental health wards for 8 years as well as in the children’s charity Kids Company, working in schools in East London. She completed an MA in Psychoanalytic Observation Studies at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in 2013 and has been working at GSMD as a Lecturer, Module Lead and Vocal Tutor on the Music Therapy MA course since 2015. Cressida is also currently Music Therapist at Treloar’s School and College for young people with complex neuro diversity and physical support needs. She plays the violin and piano and sings in an eclectic range of styles, collaborating with dancers as well as many different genres of musicians, often incorporating improvisation into her practice.
Karen Wise is Research Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she is also Lecturer in Psychology on the Music Therapy MA course. She is a founder member of the Guildhall School’s Institute for Social Impact Research in the Performing Arts. Her research interests include musical creativity, performance and in particular, adult musical development, identity and learning, from novices and the self-proclaimed ‘non-musical’ to professionals. She has published on the psychology of singing and self-defined ‘tone deafness’, and recently was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Finding a Voice: The art and science of unlocking the potential of adult non-singers’. Karen was Research Associate in the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, University of Cambridge, and has held psychology teaching posts at the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Keele. She is also a classical mezzo soprano and singing teacher.
