Teaching secondary music

3.2 Non-formal settings and pedagogies

Non-formal settings are where musical activities led by adults (often professional musicians and musicians working in the community) take place in venues such as youth clubs. It is important to note that these are not unstructured or unplanned sessions – the difference lies in the way the music educators who lead them tend to come to the session not with fixed ideas about what is to be learned and how learning will be sequenced, but with what Smith describes as ‘a proposal for action which sets out the essential principles and features of the educational encounter’ (Smith, 2000, p. 15).

Figure 5 Brass band