An arts practice investigation concerning the effects of community music  workshops on a primary school community in inner city Dublin

This PhD thesis is an arts practice investigation concerning the effects of community music workshops on a primary school community in inner city Dublin. It details my work as the primary facilitator for Masamba Samba School in St. James’s Primary School, Dublin 8.

Masamba Samba School is an Irish community music collective, founded in 1994 and working with disadvantaged communities through percussion and dance. St. James’s Primary School is an inner-city school, serving a diverse community which exhibits many aspects of material and cultural disadvantage.

The research investigates my music workshops in the school, with a particular focus on the preparations and rehearsals towards a public performance in December 2020. In addition, the research examines my relationship with the entire school community including teaching staff, school management and the wider community all of whom are important stakeholders in both the life of the school, and my own practice. A second research stream documents the creation of a video-based learning resource based on the Afro-Brazilian maculêlê rhythm.

Chapter one examines my progression to a career in community music and situates my current practice in St. James’s Primary School. This chapter also examines the methodological approaches I use. My primary approach is arts practice research, but I also employ research methods such as autoethnography, personal narrative, and a wide-ranging literature review to interrogate my practice.

Chapter two examines my practice through the lenses of the three main pillars that support the work: community music, music education and social justice. This chapter also investigates the phenomenon of Afro Brazilian percussion music as my primary mode of delivery.

Chapter three introduces my initial ideas for performances, and details how the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic severely hampered both my performance and research projects.

Chapter four describes how I worked around the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic to design and deliver two performances that facilitated further research. These performances are (i) a series of workshops in a primary school, leading to a small public performance, and (ii) the production of a video-based learning resource on the theme of the maculêlê rhythm. The chapter outlines the planning and execution of both performances and the methods used to generate data from them.

The final chapter seeks to generate learning from the performances, using thematic analysis as the primary data analysis tool. This process resulted in the emergence of three meta themes: relationships, creativity and resilience. These meta themes demonstrate the reciprocal relationship whereby my practice makes a positive contribution to the overall work of the school, whilst at the same time the prolonged period of community music activity and reflection in the school resulted in both tangible and intangible effects on my work