“Bringing a ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to music education: A National Plan for Music Education 2022”

ANNOTATION: Carol Bacchi (2023) Bringing a ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to music education: a national plan for music education 2022, Music Education Research, 25:3, 231-241, DOI: 10.1080/14613808.2023.2223220

This article presents Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) critical approach to interpreting the UK’s National Plan for Music Education document (2022). First presented in 1999, WPR was conceived as a means by which to interrogate political policy. Its intention was to read into any given policy proposal to infer what societal problem it is intending to solve, and then interrogate the assumptions that lead to interpreting any given societal condition as a “problem.” In this article, Bacchi applies WPR’s seven-question approach to analyze the underlying assumptions, questions, and messages apparent and implied in the proposals presented in the National Plan for Music Education. Rather than analyze the “shoulds” that the National Plan suggests, she presents an alternate way of thinking about the primary debates in music education: progression/development (i.e., how do we define, evaluate, and mark “progress” in music learning?), inclusion and diversity (how to we ensure equal access), talent and creativity (how can our training contribute to the national talent pool… and what is implied in that very question), teacher training and professionalism (what constitutes “training” and who is considered “worthy” as a teacher), and evidence-based policy (how do we know what works so we can fund it?). Importantly, she also suggests a number or areas for further research.

I read several articles in the process of understanding Bacchi’s WPR approach. The example Bacchi repeatedly uses i to describe the WPR framework is this: A common suggestion to increase the number of women in positions of influence is to offer training programs. This suggested solution assumes that the reason women are not in positions of influence is lack of training; training is what the problem is “represented to be.” Presenting training as a solution silences all other potential reasons and solutions for women’s absence at the table, and further, it puts the onus of fixing the problem on the women themselves, rather than questioning the ecology of conditions that may have led to this situation.

The WPR strategy is based on seven questions to be asked of any policy or any solution-directed research question:
1. What is the ‘problem’ represented to be?
2. What assumptions/presuppositions underlie this representation?
3. How has this representation come about?
4. What is left out of this question? Where are the silences? Can the problem be thought about differently?
5. What effects are produced by this particular representation of the problem?
6. How has this representation been produced, disseminated, and defended? How has it been replaced?
7. How does this list of questions apply to my own problem representations?

The questions are not intended to provide incontrovertible answers, but serve as an open-ended method of inquiry designed to continually subject existing hierarchies and hegemonies to ongoing question. Bacchi’s approach was initially conceived as a way to interrogate public policy solutions, but since has been applied widely in a variety of settings, including research and scholarship. WPR is an analytical strategy rather than a research method, but I pursued it in this assignment about research methods because it presents an alternative method to clarify and “de-subjectify” a research question. This approach applies to educational research, especially in trying to understand, characterize, and improve functions within an online learning environment in the arts, because it helps the researcher formulate and phrase the right questions before one decides on a research method that will answer those questions.

Angelique Blestas wrote of the WPR method, “… the WPR approach sidesteps, avoids, and challenges taken-for-granted approaches to ‘problem solving’ [and rejects] the idea that problems exist ‘out there’ to be stumbled upon.” She describes Bacchi’s post-structuralist approach as a challenge to the relationship between the researcher and the subject to which the research is being applied, as it questions the distinction between the phenomena and the expert. The relationship between them is more complex, and Blestas suggests that to engage in research on a subject is not to observe it passively but rather to intervene in it in some way. The approach implies that since phenomena are not fixed, there can be no final word on anything—and that perhaps providing the “final word” on something should not be the only purpose of research.

One of the more intriguing tidbits from Bacchi’s article appeared in her commentary on the National Plan’s conception of creativity. “The strong focus on the future potential of the ‘creative industries’ has been linked to the tendency for neoliberalism to economize everything. To resist this ‘colonization of creativity’ Kanellopoulos (2022, 145) endorses an alternative conceptual apparatus that might permit a conceptualization of creativity as subversive.”

Additional Resources :

“Chapter 2: Introducing the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach.” Bletsas, A. & Beasley, C. (eds.) 2012. Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions & Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.

“Chapter 4: Spaces Between: Elaborating the theoretical underpinnings of the ‘WPR’ approach and its significance for contemporary scholarship.” Bletsas, A. & Beasley, C. (eds.) 2012. Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions & Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.

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