Derrington 2012 thesis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

The sessions aimed to increase the adolescents’ learning resources and their social
and emotional development. The study found that adolescents benefitted from having
a space where they were encouraged to communicate honestly within a group.
An innovative music therapy group project run by Fouché and Torrance (2005) in
Cape Town, South Africa, involved youth rival gang members and was successful.
Brought in by police escort, the young people voluntarily met each week, shared their
stories and improvised together joined by the magnet of music. The authors write:
‘Music is a 'cool' thing to do. Within the gangs' rap/hip-hop culture, the musicians are
the heroes, looked up to by the youth; the ones who give social commentary’. The
importance of using rap and hip-hop in music therapy is also reported by Elligan
(2000 and 2004), Tyson (2002), Tillie Allen (2005), Kobin and Tyson (2006),
Cobbett (2009) and Uhlig (2011b).
Uhlig (2011a and 2011b) looks at the effects of vocal interventions in music therapy
on the emotional and cognitive development of at-risk children and adolescents.
Having developed a rap music therapy method to support the child’s expression ‘of
emotional and cultural values sustained by a rhythm’ (2011a, p.79) she suggests that,
together with the therapeutic relationship based on sharing rap, behavioural changes
can occur. This is the focus of her on-going research investigation.
In the UK, music therapy in mainstream schools has been the focus of some student
therapists (Carson, 2007; Hitch, 2010; Crookes, 2012), interested to know how music
therapy promotes inclusion of children with special needs, how the mainstream
school environment can impact on practice and how methods of engagement may be
diversified in response to mainstream children. Hitch concludes her findings with the
need for further research and, in particular, longitudinal approaches with quantitative
methods.
Pethybridge and Robertson (2010) call for a new approach to working in schools and
advocate the distinction between clinical music therapy and educational music
therapy, an approach which they define as ‘the potential to guide the student into
areas of learning about music as a result of the musical experience acquired through
musical interaction’ (p.131). Students from a language and communication unit
attached to a mainstream school took part in their research study, called Youth Music
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