Case studies
Drumming at the heart – Wangaratta West Primary School
Wangaratta West Primary School’s music specialist, Georgina Wills, is upfront about how important music is in school life and supports her views with a quote from Richard Gill, AO, conductor and music education advocate: ‘Social inclusion, communal behaviours, cooperation, ensemble skills, teamwork and sharing creative ideas all become part of a serious music education.’
While the school clearly takes its music learning program seriously, there is a lively element at the heart of the program, which focuses on African drumming, and the program doesn’t stop at the school gates.
When Georgina started the program in 2009 she couldn’t have imagined how much of an impact African drumming would have, not just in the music classroom, but also in the lives of others in the community. The drumming students at the school now participate in a program called HeartBeat – one-on-one drumming with adults who have an acquired brain injury. The innovative and unique program has been presented at international conferences on neuro-rehab and Georgina regularly gives presentations at Charles Sturt University to its occupational therapy students.
Back in 2009, though, Georgina was standing in the music room when the idea for a drumming program came to her.
I was just standing in the music room – we had a few miscellaneous drums, bongos, a kid’s drum, a couple of djembes. I didn’t know how to play – I knew you could make a bass sound and a tone sound, but nothing else about how to play – but after I had the idea, I spent the summer on the internet researching. I ended up contacting African Drumming in St Kilda and asked them to teach me how to teach kids.
The program at school began with Georgina bringing together the most capable rhythm students in the school – those who could repeat and maintain a rhythm while she played something different.
The next year was spent establishing a modest drumming program in the school, while Georgina developed her own confidence in playing drums and teaching the students how to play them.
The following year, a request from a personal contact led to the event that would change the impact of drumming in the school. A good friend, who is an occupational therapist, asked if the students would come and play for the North East Health neuro-support group, which is a support group for people who have had a brain injury or a stroke.
I said we could play, but I’d rather we get people involved too – they can have a go. So we ran a little drum circle – the kids were on one side of the circle and the adults on the other. I asked them to look up and see someone across the circle and find someone who was playing on the same number beat as them. You just choose a number between one and eight and play on that number and suddenly there was this beautiful moment when the kids and the adults connected with one another.
Following the success of the drum circle, Georgina met with a neuroscientist and the occupational therapist from the Community Care Centre at North East Health to discuss running a pilot program over a number of weeks.
We could see the value right there in that moment – the impact it could have on the rehab of the clients.
Georgina didn’t want to commit the students to something ongoing straight away so she agreed to a pilot of six weeks – meeting in the music room for one hour every Monday. Each adult was partnered with a member of the school’s senior drumming group. Georgina facilitated the drum circle, leading warm-up activities in which only the occupational therapist and physiotherapy clients get their hands on the drums, then moving on to maintaining a beat, and beginning to alternate their right and left hands (if the adults were able to do this).
The results were very positive and the students were enthusiastic about keeping the program going once they could see the positive impact for their adult partners.
It was amazing how instinctive the kids were about altering the way they played to match the client. We didn’t say whether or not they could only play with one hand. We didn’t say what the disability was. One girl was playing drums with a man who couldn’t speak, but she found ways to communicate with him. Another man was quite depressed came in – he had really lost his purpose. He was playing drums with a lovely boy, who, with no prompting whatsoever, worked with him in a way that was so encouraging. If the student saw that the client was struggling, he would stop and break it down, and play on that fella’s drum with him. The student was really good at engaging him in conversation. They formed this lovely bond. The adult made a huge improvement over the six-week period.
Georgina maintains, though, that the biggest impact of the program was on the students. Halfway through the pilot program she asked them how they thought it was going. They said they had never realised that they could use their skills to teach adults.
You have to see and you have to be there – the occupational therapist and physio would say that it’s improving the memory of each patient, their ability to process information, their coordination, their trunk control. And also in communication – I think when people have had a stroke or a brain injury it becomes really isolating for them because they go from being a capable person in the community to someone who feels at a loss. The program has helped connect people back to the community and makes them feel good about themselves.
The program has certainly created a purpose and a connection for the music students at the school to share their skills with the community and it has honed the school’s commitment to the music learning program more broadly. In 2012, the school received a specialisation grant of $100,000 for music, which has allowed Georgina to teach music exclusively.
Until then I always had to do something else – spend a couple of days doing generalist teaching in the classroom. The grant money wasn’t used to pay my wage, but because it was about establishing us as a specialist music school it definitely changed the focus.
The money enabled Wangaratta West Primary School to purchase resources that it would otherwise not have had access to. They bought a class set of iPad Acid Pro software (which lets them loop a sound sequence), more instruments for the classroom, and, of course, a new set of African drums.
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