The worst is yet to come: The psychological impact of COVID-19 on Hong Kong music teachersThe COVID-19 pandemic has made online and distance learning the new normal at all levels of education. Music as a school subject that relies heavily on multimodal sensory and auditory-motor interactions has been dramatically affected. Music teachers may not be coping mentally or psychologically with these drastic changes. This study examined the psychological impact of COVID-19 on music teachers' (N = 120) mental health and well-being through a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews (n = 10). The Fear of Coronavirus-19 Scale, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale and a shortened version of the Chinese Teacher Stress Questionnaire were used to measure Hong Kong music teachers' experiences of psychological pressure and problem behaviours linked to the outbreak of the infectious disease. The findings revealed that music teachers are experiencing stress, fear, and anxiety in response to the pandemic. They are concerned about the effectiveness of online music teaching, parental expectations, students' adaptability to online learning, technological integration and maintaining transformative teaching professionalism.

The language of music shares a number of basic processing mechanisms with natural languages, yet studies of learner autonomy in music education are rare. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of fostering music students’ learner autonomy in performance practice through a series of curriculum changes. A mixed-methods approach, including a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews, was used to investigate two cohorts of music education students (N = 74) from Hong Kong. The analysis reveals the students’ autonomous learner characteristics, including the ability to formulate their own learning strategies, identify both musical and non-musical weaknesses and take appropriate steps to improve their performance skills.

There is a rising critique of the process and position of decision-making across music interventions, which has been evidenced through the MUSOC research network debates that we, as doctoral students, have participated in. In this article, we specifically discuss ‘intervention’ as ‘deliberate strategies that seek to enable people to find self-expression through musical means’ (Bartleet and Higgins 2018: 3). We offer three perspectives from three different intervention contexts: community music in schools, organizational settings and music-making workshops. Through this article, we share and reflect on our experience with intervention and decision making within our practice. We give specific focus to: how intentions and motivations underpinning interventionist practice manifest in different contexts; how this is currently informed by the decision-making structures through which community music is practised in each context; and, the extent to which dominant modes of practice have potential to disempower participants, including how they are reinforced and re-enacted through this process. Finally, we suggest that how we talk about intervention across peers, and how we enact it through our practice as practitioners and researchers is possibly misaligned. This warrants further consideration if explorations of the term ‘intervention’ are to feed into discussion and action for responsible practice.

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