Qualitative Research in Music Education: a new challenge in the Spanish educational context

Abstract

To say that the research in Music Education is in mantillas in our country is something by all known. The incorporation to the Spanish University of the Master's degrees in Music Education and Bachelor's Degree in Music History and Sciences, as well as the implementation of the Music subject in the Compulsory Education curriculum should justify in themselves a quality research that will bring To the Spanish Musical Education of the estrecheces to which it has been traditionally condemned. To work in any aspect of the Music is usually a very complex task. The fact, for example, that the psychology of music is still in its infancy as a science is not accidental. It is even less so that in modern Spain, "modern methods of musical education" are still considered as those that other European countries saw born in the first decades of this century that are already leaving us. This fact is worrying in itself: how is it possible to think that practically nothing has happened in musical education for almost a century (without going back in time)? Is it not rather that he has not thought seriously about it? Without discarding other paradigms in educational research (given the precarious situation of the current musical education are not the times to rule out anything a priori), we propose in the present communication qualitative (or naturalistic) research as a possible way to face the Complicated world of the teaching-learning process in the Music Room from a global, ambitious intentionality if you will. This attempt to understand the complex and sometimes difficult interactions in the Music class goes through listening to the interpretations that the actors themselves (read, teachers, students, educational policy makers, publishers ...) give to their actions, So that the intervention proposals that may arise from a qualitative research will do so from the understanding of the educational practice from its natural (ecological) context in which it is developed.