AH: Today, I’m really excited to be joined by some of the team at CUMIN, the contemporary urban music for inclusion network, who are Doctor Pete Dale, Professor Pam Burnard, and Doctor Rafael Travis from the universities of York, Cambridge and Texas, and Doctor Raphael Travis is soon moving to the University of Delaware. So why I thought you’d be interested in this is that we all know and we see in our work what a deep and wide impact music has on young people, particularly when it’s driven by, or sparked off through, their own musical passions and interests. And it has a particularly valuable outcome for those who face the biggest barriers in learning and in life. There’s a lot of great research, evaluation and learning going on, but until recently, this wasn’t really very connected. So CUMIN is a network that’s bringing this all together, and having listened to their own podcast, which I can highly recommend, I’m really pleased that they’re joining me today. So welcome Pete, Pam and Raphael.
All three: [Pete] Hi there. [Raphael] Hello, great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. [Pam] And for me, thank you, Anita.
AH: Oh, you’re really welcome. So could you each tell me very briefly about yourselves, what you do, what your musical specialisms and interests are, and what change you want to bring about through music?
PD: Yeah, sure. Hi. I’m Pete Dale, and I’m a lecturer in music education at the University of York. I’ve been here since 2021, and before that, I was at Manchester Metropolitan University. And then before that, Oxford Brookes University. That was after many years of working as a school teacher. I did that for nine years. Previous to that, I did about 10 years working as a musician. In terms of music specialism, I suppose that you know, I’m a trained jazz guitar player, but in my teaching, I got really interested in DJing as a musical skill and the DJ decks as a musical instrument. So that has been quite a big research interest for me for well over 10 years, probably more like 15 years, and I was practicing in classrooms with DJ decks and DJ education for years before that, indeed. So that was partly what led to working, initially just with Pam on the idea of the contemporary urban music for inclusion network, and then we developed that into a full network, with Raphael being one of the key members of that network and a wider group of people involved in it. The change that I really would like to see is for music education to become much more open to all different kinds of music. I think that has improved since I went to school in the 80s, but I feel there’s a lot more need for further improvement. So that’s the big change that I’d like to see.
AH: Thank you. Over to you, Raphael,
RT: Yes, great. So I’m again, Raphael Travis, I’m a licensed clinical social worker, also a social work educator, and I’m at Texas State University and I’m soon to be transitioning to the University of Delaware. In addition, I’m an academic researcher focusing on how we invest in the wellbeing of young people and young adults. Really across the life course, but I do tend to focus on teens and young adults. As well as I’m an administrator, so currently the Interim Director of the School of Social Work. Really, in terms of music, looking at the ways that we engage music. So a lot of times we think about music, we just think about listening or creating music, but really looking at the universe of ways that we engage music as a pathway to wellbeing. And I have a particular focus on hip hop culture, born and raised in New York during the birth of the culture and really helping people understand hip hop is beyond, you know, rap music and the empowering values and aspects of the culture. And what I really hope to see, and what I want is I really want people to appreciate music engagement for individual change as much as community change. So it’s a lot of times music therapy comes to mind when people think about the positive values or music education in the classroom. But I’m really interested in really highlighting [that] you can get the same out of it in terms of personal engagement as engagement with a professional.
AH: Oh, that sounds really interesting. And Pam, how about you?
PB: Thank you. I’m Australian. I’ve been in the UK over 20 years, and I’m in the middle of my third career. I started as a professional working in the creative industries. I got into my second career, which is education, working across primary and secondary schools mainly. That was really prompted by doing a Masters in the States at Indiana University. And I just saw the energy, the engagement, the enlightenment that comes when you’re in in the presence of young people. So I got hooked into education and worked in Australia in many different education sectors. My third career is University, and I work at the University of Cambridge here in the UK. I’m a professor of arts, creativities and educations. And you might be wondering, what is she doing putting ‘s’ at the end of each of those words. Well, my big mantra is plurality. I want to see us pluralise everything, because it is much more inclusive to do that when it comes to knowledges, when it comes to literacies, when it comes to musics. And my passion, of course, is creativities, because we’re co-authoring, making new all the time, every day, whether it’s everyday creativity or digital creativity or wellbeing creativity, which in itself is an authoring, often co-authoring of a different kind, to say, mathematic creativity. So I’m wanting us to unpack and trouble. You know, just stay with the trouble of, why? Why just go with music? Why not acknowledge there’s many and say musics and make it much more inclusive, and why not privilege each one of us by not leaving the big innovations to so called geniuses, you know, the most talented, but rather realise we can empower ourselves and each other to make change.
AH: Oh, wow Pam. Thank you for that. And what a simple and powerful change we can all make to our language. Add the ‘s’. Before we move on to next question, I just want to correct something that I said, University of Texas and Rafael is actually at Texas State University, so apologies for that, Rafael. So how did you all meet?
PB: I read Pete’s book and then invited him to Cambridge to talk about it, because he was doing this amazing work with young boys in secondary school. So he was really transforming what a music classroom looks like through turntablist practices. And then it blew my mind. I thought, Yes, this is important. And this is now probably 15 years ago, I think.
AH: And I guess the least obvious person to connect with you two would be Raphael over in the States. So how did you come to meet the other two, Rafael?
RT: It was an invitation from Pete first, if I’m not mistaken.
PD: That’s right, yeah, and your name came up from Elliot Gann. Actually, what happened was, Pam, I think this would have been about seven years ago. Was doing a series, which you did for a long time, didn’t you, of weekly seminars at Cambridge, and I saw that Elliot was speaking, that he was going to be talking about hip hop. I traveled down to Cambridge and talked with Elliot and with Pam, and Elliot mentioned you, and I mentioned to both Elliot and Pam that I was considering trying to get some funding for a network around contemporary music, hip hop and more. And so he suggested you as a great person to speak to, and Pam and I went for dinner that evening and decided that we would bid for funding together, which was successful and led to the CUMIN project.
AH: That brings me on to the next question, what is CUMIN and why is it needed?
PD: Well, the original idea for doing a network, I thought that there was a need to look beyond what I was working on, which was quite relatively narrow around DJ education, and actually look a bit further. I mean, one of the most obvious things was rapping, which I don’t know a lot about. And I had hoped that I would that we would, through the network, uncover more people who were doing rapping work in schools and outside of schools, but perhaps for health and healing. And we did, we have managed to find people doing that kind of work, but I just thought it would be a really good idea to gather together and give options for networking meetings and conferences. For people who working in this area, and something which, which was a really big, important part for me, that Pam brought to it was the idea that we should also think about how you can have impact with this kind of work. What is the impact? And perhaps most crucially, how does one best measure that impact? So I don’t know if you want to speak to that Pam?
PB: Interesting. You know, the business of impact – we are driven by this word in higher education, but also in secondary education. All teachers out there will know, anyone with a corporate, you know, organisation will know that. You know, they’re always looking at the numbers. They’re looking to see if it’s moving up or it’s moving down, to see where the trends are and what impact you’re having, your business, your education, your teaching is having. And impact is a word that it really terrorises you, because you know, how do you provide evidence that you’re making a difference? How do we know when we’re actually enacting change? We are the cause of it? So a lot of people in World Health Organization, people in medical, and Raphael will be able to speak to this, use random control trials done over three years. And they’re very specific, and they’re they win a lot of money, but actually, you know the extent to which, what do those random, controlled trials really measure, and what are they leaving out? And so when we think about arts organisations, you know, artists putting in for grants, and researchers putting in for grants, you have to sort of show impact. You have to show how your public money is going to actually make an impact. So you’ve got to kind of either evaluate your practice or actually measure the change. It’s very hard to measure change. You know, when it comes to musics, because you know what is causing it? What’s causing the change? Is it the music? Is it the people? Is it the gathering, the social gathering, the social emotional learning that may have nothing to do with the musics, although we know that that’s actually not the case from a lot of research, and now I’m actually researching transcending measurement and looking at what matters when making with music more equitable wellbeing in the health and social care systems. And I’m not leading this. I’m sort of jumped into another network, which are people in social care and medical group psychologists from Edinburgh, and they are wanting to kind of elaborate and expand the practices of measuring impact. They look at causation, what causes what, looking at what people eat, their lifestyle, their socio-economic circumstances, and they have all of these measurements and figures, and they look at what’s potentially causing what, and then they go in and do some treatments or some interventions. And even that word intervention I have a trouble with for all sorts of reasons. I’ll stop there and say, Raphael, you have, I’m sure, a lot of things to say about this word impact.
RT: Yes, I do. And just to kind of circle back to why CUMIN is important for me, it was really exciting to get the invitation to be a part of this collective and just the idea of bringing together a network of people to think deliberatively about music and the potential for its greater inclusion within schools and other settings is really important. It being global in nature, me being in the United States, and the intentional effort to bring together Global Voices was really powerful to me. Hip hop in particular, can be US-centric in a lot of spaces, bringing together these Global Voices and being a part of that was really important to me. The other part that was very important was thinking about non-traditional classical forms of music engagement, which is the thing that tends to be prioritised in the classroom and in these different spaces. And saying yes, hip hop is important, yes, these other electronic driven music forms are important. That was incredibly significant on a global stage. And this other area of the importance of measurement and evaluation is also, you know, as a researcher, significant for me. You know, a part of what I wanted to be very deliberate about was to be very clear from a measurement and empirical standpoint. We know anecdotally, and there’s lots of research, qualitative research, which is extremely valuable supporting this work. But I really wanted to bring the full range of measurement to how we think about engaging hip hop culture in pursuit of learning and growth. And also when we think about these desirable outcomes, it’s not just a reduction of bad things, which is important right, I measure the impacts on stress, measure the impacts on anxiety and depression, but also, what are those positive things that we know can be facilitated by music engagement and also just the opportunity to learn what other people are doing so learning about Pete’s work and learning about so many others. While DJ culture is emphasised here, it’s not as well tracked in terms of its potential impact and written about with the same level of rigour and enthusiasm. And so all of these things came together, and I can’t underscore enough how important this network has been and continues to be.
AH: And you said that one of the key questions for CUMIN is, ‘Can projects using contemporary urban music impact significantly on education and social inclusion, and how can we best measure that impact?’. And that, ‘how can we best measure that impact?’ is something that I know that listeners to this podcast will be struggling with and thinking about daily, and so I’m just interested to hear from you what you’re learning from each other about that.
PD: I would say on that a really important contributor to that aspect of the discussion was Simon Glennister, and I do want to mention Simon and the others from our core steering team who put so much into the network. So Simon has an organisation called Noise Solution. A big part of what he does is using the Warwick Edinburgh Wellbeing Scale, known as WEM web sometimes for short, and using that to see exactly what impact he’s having on or his organisation are having on the young people that participate in it. We also had Elliot Gann, who has been mentioned a few times now with his Today’s Future Sound organisation, we had a link. Greaseley was one of our core steering team, and she’s based at the University of Leeds, and is really interesting because she’s from a classical music background. She’s a concert violinist still plays in orchestras, but also DJs. But then, you know, as Rafael was saying, we brought in people to speak at our networking events or to contribute to the book on Oxford University Press. We had a book called ‘Music for inclusion and healing in schools and beyond’, with the three of us editing, and chapters by a lot of the people who’d spoken, and several of those were from around the world, others from the United States, such as Alex Crook and Jabari Evans, Rafael was able to bring to the network. And then people from Europe, such as Inka Rantakallio, who wrote about hip hop in Finland, and Johan Söderman, who wrote about hip hop in Sweden. It’s difficult to say exactly what conclusions were had. But I think that one of the things that people quite strongly felt about, you know how to measure impact, was that everybody is doing it and doing it in different ways, and finding that there is huge impact.
PB: At our first gathering, the launch of this network, it was a hybrid event, and one of our keynotes was Professor Sonia Ilie from the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education where I work. And she is not a professional musician. She is not a music educator. She is someone who reads and understands and measures change in education systems. And so she’s a big data person, and we invited her because she does have a real interest in music, but to look at and critique what it is that’s important about measurement and knowing that it is, you know, it’s really one of the hardest things to measure and assess what changes because of engagement in music and musics, and there’s amazing research, and we are seeing absolute hardcore evidence that says wellbeing immeasurably improves with engagement in music. And one of those persons is Simon Glennister, who is the CEO and founder of Noise Solution. And he also has a chapter in the book that Pete mentioned. But Sonia and Simon both are one of the three podcast episodes and those two give an incredible sort of conversation, really around the importance of measuring impact, and Simon does it brilliantly, because he is developing a digital platform that actually measures wellbeing, but it also documents the reflections of the young people that he’s working with. He works with young people that drop out of school or that won’t come out of their bedrooms. And so he uses digital diaries, cloud technologies, and studio recording with a range of musicians that you know really are across genres. And they work closely with the parents, with the young people communicate with each other using cloud technologies. So it’s very discursive. It’s very much a community of transdisciplinary people, social workers, psychiatrists, local council and parents are in there and musicians.
RT: I think something we all can learn from an evaluative standpoint is that we have to be mindful of, when we’re measuring, can we measure in ways that are less intrusive, and it doesn’t have to be digital, but if it taps into what we know are kind of the underlying positive developmental experiences, such as connection or relationship, such as community. Can we fold our evaluation and measurement into these naturally occurring positive things that we know are important in promoting wellbeing? Something that we struggle with, anytime we do our work, we’re like, how can we make these evaluation tools less intrusive and a more natural part of the strategies that we’re using to engage young people? One of the things that we piloted last year was we decided to do a culminating podcast for the youth about their experience throughout that camp, we had a mixtape camp. We had them come up with questions about their overall experience and interview each other and talk about it. So it was a natural part of things they were learning about podcasting and from a technical standpoint and a relational standpoint, but it was also reflective of their overall experience and some of the things that we wanted to know in terms of impact. So it’s those types of things where I think there are opportunities for people to experiment with non-traditional forms of measurement in the ways that Simon’s work prioritises connection and positive, supportive relationships, and prioritises community and that sense of belonging.
PB: I have to agree with you entirely. You know, the key word you just used was community, because he’s creating a community between the parents and their child, the parents and other parents, the child and other children, young people, but these young people working and being guided and supported and encouraged by a range of professionals who are absolutely on their side. And I wouldn’t want to recommend one measure of wellbeing, because there are so many. And what’s important is to explore which one is right for you. I have a doctoral student, Wendy Forbes, she is working with wellbeing in a primary school, and she’s measuring the wellbeing of children in the beginning and the middle and the end of the academic year, but she’s actually looking at these measures of wellbeing in relation to comparing the results of that measurement of those that are engaged in singing and those that are not. And of course, she’s not going to make any causation claims, but we will come to a better nuanced understanding of what influences change in how people see themselves, their autonomy, their connections, their relatedness, the business of really having a forever journey with whichever musics they’re into. So the business of ‘the measure’, I think it’s the problematising. Can we stay with the trouble of what isn’t a measure, or is it an evidencing the enactment of change? I think sometimes the government’s right into measurement, and you know, so is senior management. They want to see the performativity of, you know, how many PhD students you’ve put forward, how many grants you’ve got, how much money you’ve bought in, how many pieces you’ve published. This is the competitive measurement of performative practices that is actually very divisive. It’s not helpful to create a supportive, caring, open, democratic, engaged community. And so in schools, in universities, in organisations, all of these places want to engage in innovative practices. Want to develop evaluation practices that are sort of grow from inside the organisation. And the agency of that community and communities are really sort of voiced in that evaluation. So I want to make the case that we do think like Simon Glennister does with Noise Solution, about a sort of an assemblage of practices that one size doesn’t fit all, but one practice isn’t enough. It’s a number of practices. People are using AI, for example, in very innovative ways as a way of analysing, you know, masses of data that you’d have to have an army of researchers to manage and to make sense of. While we know we do have problems with AI, of course, and given a critical lens, but there are places for a new roles, for partnerships with humans and machines
AH: Definitely. I mean, that’s really interesting, the use of AI in evaluation, because AI can process thematic analysis a lot faster than humans and not be prone to human bias, although obviously there is some AI bias, which we all have to be careful about. Yeah, and that’s an interesting thing that Noise Solution are doing as part of their practice. So what I’m hearing is that, and I think a lot of listeners will feel this pressure, this kind of, oh, we’re evaluating the impact for the funders. It’s performative, and it goes against what we instinctively want to do, which is to naturally talk to the people we’re working with and really genuinely understand what’s changing for them, what they think is important and meaningful, and capturing that in a way that’s integral to the activity they’re involved in. Is that, is that right?
PD: I think that’s a fair summary, yeah.
RT: We can’t escape those to Pam’s point, the things that are used to evaluate us, you know. You know, for example, in my work, why my valued, desirable outcome is empowerment, is positive development. I know that for the lion’s share of organisations and stakeholders, the currency is in the reduction of negative outcomes. And so I have to measure stress, I have to measure anxiety, I have to measure depression. And it makes sense anyway that a lot of these strategies and activities will inhibit those undesirable outcomes. But at the same time, I’m most interested in empowerment, in increasing people’s sense of wellbeing, and that they feel like they have a positive future, and that they feel that their ability to connect with the people they care about is improving. They feel engaged in making society better. Those are the things that I care about, and so I’m going to make sure that I measure those things as well.
PB: That’s a wonderful statement, really, Raphael, because you’re measuring outcomes as opposed to causation. And I think we should, you know, really make very clear it is about outcomes rather than what causes what? If and when you go and see, you know, a specialist to do with, with anything you know, let’s just say blood, they will have a range of prognoses, you know, they’ll have a range of things that it could be this, it could be that, you know, and what if we did this? And then? And so, the certainties with sciences is a myth, I think. And so really thinking about measuring outcomes over time that are attributed to do a particular practice, given that we’re working with socially engaged practices, and that evaluation is a reflexive process, and if you are measuring change, we’re seeing what changes over time, then that is measuring the outcomes of a practice. And I think we look to Raphael and to Elliot Gann and many others in the states you know are working in in this field, in music education, less so in this country. In this country, you’ll find lots of people in medical health systems measuring change over time, not so much the impact and measurement of … it’s happening, but it’s very small because of the culture of music education research and the funding as well. And I don’t know why does it happen in the states Raphael? Why is there so much research funded that does look at quantifying outcomes?
RT: I think there’s an argument to be made that people are doing the work. It’s not necessarily well funded. There is a recognition that the evidence needs to get out there, that it’s not well documented, at least in our circles. And again, coming back to why CUMIN is important, the voices that are in these network, there’s a consensus, there’s a recognition that we know anecdotally, we understand it, but there needs to be evidence. And so I think that phase of understanding and recognition has happened. And so people are doing the best they can to get the evidence out there, to get it in the hands of practitioners, so they can show their supervisors, they can show their colleagues, like in terms of funding for it, we still have a long way to go. It’s rigorous, it’s empirical. People are doing well to align with the standards of science and be innovative and creative. But from a funding standpoint, there’s still a long way to go, and that’s a big part of my work. And again, I keep coming back to why CUMIN is important, why having these networks and continuing to talk, continuing to get the word out. So I’m just as much interested in the outcomes of my next mix tape camp, as I am being on a podcast like this to help people understand that we do need more funding. We need more funding from the research side. We need more funding for teaching artists to be able to collaborate.
AH: I think people often feel that the only way we’ll get more funding is by being more rigorous and empirical, as you’ve said, and I think that people often associate that with the type of research that is about causation, direct causes of change, rather than correlation. Where we can say that this intervention is strongly associated with improvement, so that, you know, there’s big difference between that. And I think what Pam is saying is that we need to accept that we often can’t prove causation. So is it still possible to be rigorous and empirical without evidence in causation? Sorry, that’s a very, very kind of academic question.
PB: Yes. I mean, we can say we could give you 100 projects, big and small, where the final claim is that singing or hip hop or turntablists as contemporary musics enhance young people’s sense of belonging or their sense of wellbeing or self-efficacy. We know this. We have rigorous proof, and that is important. The trouble is the systems, you know when it comes to research funding and institutions and politicians, they really like this sort of measurement stuff where you do see a direct causation or even a correlation. You know, they run with a model. Rather than looking at the plurality of sciences that are out there. We are seeing more and more research funding going to projects that are transdisciplinary, not working in silos, but rather having specialists across different subject domains, coming together to transcend what we know from those subjects. You know, I think that holds great promise for anyone out there who’s looking to either put a research grant together or put a grant together for the local council, and in that proposal, you’re going to put in the practice of evaluation as part of your practice, rather than an add on and some measuring, you know, of wellbeing, or some change of self-perception of people are talking about how they felt at the beginning and then how they feel at the end. That is evidence. It’s what is it that the community is telling us that’s working, and the why and the how, you know, are harder questions. We’ve got to keep trying to answer them, but the big question is to ensure the communities like this collective keep pooling ideas and staying with the trouble of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, and connecting all these wonderful insights from a global perspective.
AH: Absolutely, still learning, always learning and valuation is basically about understanding and learning, isn’t it? Rather than trying to prove anything necessarily.
RT: I could add a tiny little piece on that causation question. I do two branches of work, from a measurement standpoint. One is there is an implied causal mechanism from the intervention type work where we have participants, and we capture how they are before the start of the intervention, and then we work with them either over a week or over a month, and then we measure at the end, and so we try to capture to the best extent possible, what is the implied change, and can we attribute that to their music engagement experiences? So there is an empirical, causal mechanism there. The other branch of my work is more correlational. It’s where I’m looking at attitudes and perceptions about music engagement. And so, for example, the chapter that’s in the CUMIN book looks closely at intentional use of music, and without getting into the weeds of it, essentially we’re asking what is linked to people reporting a higher level of empowering music engagement in your general day to day engagement of music, does it tend to be more empowering? Does it tend to be more risky? And what can we correlate with that? One of the big findings is that people that are more intentional about empowering engagement tend to report that, right? So if I’m listening to music with the intent of regulating my emotions, reducing negative feelings or increasing positive feelings, then I’m more likely to have that outcome. So there are two different branches of measurement, but there is one that is very deliberate about capturing implied causal impacts of music engagement.
AH: Interesting. We’re nearing the end of the podcast, I’m afraid. But just to sort of wrap that up, CUMIN is still exploring all these different types of evaluation, looking at who’s doing what types of evaluation, and trying to bring people together to discuss this. Is that right? You’re still a network that people can join?
PD: Yeah, there’s no sort of formal way of joining, but we are still working on the network. Hence the podcast series, which is the most recent thing we’ve done. The difficulty is we had some funding initially from the AHRC. Since then, there hasn’t really been money to support networking events, but we are still trying to do things and still using the mailing list. So I would encourage people to go to the website and you can sign up yourself for the mailing list on there, because then we can let you know about anything relevant that’s happening.
AH: And you do also have the book, ‘Music for inclusion and healing in schools and beyond’, which I think listeners will get a lot out of.
PD: I would definitely encourage people to have a look at it. It’s got a range of contributions from music educators, such as the people from Musical Futures through to academics, or just people who are doing work out there in the community, people like Kiz Manley from Hip Hop Heels, just to name one, I hope people will have a look at that if they’re able to.
AH: Thanks for that. So finally, I usually ask people to share either three practical pieces of advice or maybe three calls to action for others working music for change. So can I start perhaps with Pete?
PD: The three big things for me is, I would say, firstly, if you’re working in a school, if you’re a music teacher or perhaps an instrumental vocal teacher, then do widen up your coverage as much as you can, because it’s so powerful to go outside of what you normally do and to dabble in other areas, particularly those that are always kept at the margins, such as hip hop, notably in this country, grime, electronic dance music. Secondly, I’d say those who are in the field of music learning, but outside of schools and universities and those kind of establishments, remember that the establishments can shift. It takes time, but so don’t think of it just as a monolith. Try and keep changing it. And then, thirdly, just, I don’t know, let’s say, make more music. That’s always my message.
AH: Excellent. Raphael, how about you?
RT: I would say, help the people that you’re working with embrace learning as much as growth with the desired outcomes. I often tell young people, I can’t tell you what to listen to, but just ask yourself, ‘How can I learn and how can I grow from what I’m engaging with?’. The second thing I would say is embrace music technology. It’s always innovating, expanding as much as the hardware and the software. And then the last thing I would say is think community impact as much as individual impact.
AH: Excellent. Thank you. And Pam, finally.
PB: Musics education, or music education, is a forever journey. It goes beyond the school. Where it sits in your world, as a parent, as a professional, not doing anything professionally, but loving music, then you’ll know what I mean by the fact it’s a forever journey. You can’t live without it, but to expand your world by connecting with a range of new real world practices that reflect what it is to be 10 or 12 or 14, what it is to be a rapper in Finland, what it is to be heard and get a sense of belonging through hip hop in Finland, then read chapter 18 of ‘Music for inclusion and healing in schools and beyond’. Contact the author, Inka Rantakallio, email her, talk with her, so that we open up our thinking, open our tastes and our understandings and our empathies, because music is a forever journey and connects us all. And final point, chapter 13 is the hip hopification of education and its evaluation, and it’s written by a London rapper who we invited up to Cambridge to give a workshop on literacies, because he works with young people out of schools in London, working with words, and he has transformed how we see what the craft of words and the incredible originality that goes into rapping. Start with his chapter, or just look him up, BREIS, London rapper, email him and ask him to send you the chapter. Now, I know Oxford wouldn’t be happy with that, but they can afford to lose a couple of chapters.
AH: Oh, thanks for that Pam. And I think the things that will stick with me from this chat, I feel we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more to say, but certainly plurality, plurality in learning and evaluation, particularly, but also in musics. And I love the phrase musics education, rather than music education. It’s been brilliant to hear from you all, and I wish you all the best for the development of the network and supporting the growth of contemporary urban music for education and wellbeing. The work is absolutely fascinating and really powerful, and there are lots of ripple effects. It is getting out there. Thank you very much for making the time to talk to me. It’s been fascinating.