Practice sharing: a bottom-up approach

Suppose that each and every one of the 30,000-odd people in and around music education has at least one experience from which every other could learn. Making this happen has to be about enabling and empowering those people, through a bottom-up approach to sharing practice.

Practice-sharing is all about making this empowering and enabling a reality. It’s not about publishing one document or one policy that tries to say what is the best way of doing things. The reality is, of course, that there are thousands of ways of doing things effectively – and that diversity needs, not to be quashed, but to be celebrated, shared and extended. So instead of that one approach, practice sharing is about supporting a process in which people can share with and learn from each other – embracing a wide variety of different approaches.

Top—down

In some ways, it’s about the difference between top—down and bottom—up. In a top—down approach, whatever the needs and priorities of the moment, what tends to happen is that the best approaches are identified and analysed from the grass roots level where they’re developed, and channelled upwards, through a process of selection, into the top levels of power and decision making.

The picture below shows a small number of those 30,000 people, working in and around music education and music-making.

This next picture attempts to show the hierarchical top—down structure that those people work in. In this diagram, you can see that some of those people's practice (green arrows) is identified and channelled upwards in the hierarchy.

From the top levels of power and decision making, these selected approaches and practices come back ‘down’ to the grass roots level as policy and funding: what we all can and can’t do, what we should prioritise, how we should do it, and what funding we can get to support it. (In the picture below this is the big thick arrows.)

Top—down approaches like this can have advantages, such as:

• they’re more practically manageable for hierarchic infrastructure
• they help with accountability: if everyone is required to do what’s considered the best practice, there’s less concern about people doing bad practice (which is always a significant issue where public money and children’s development are concerned)
• people at the grass roots don’t have to worry about taking responsibility for finding everything out themselves – policy and funding guides them on certain things

 

but there are also disadvantages too, (depending in part on your perspective):

• top—down approaches are not necessarily the most effective way of spreading the most effective practices, particularly if there’s a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t work well for all; top-down approaches tend to have less room to accommodate a variety of different ways of doing things
• if people at the grass-roots level feel they’re being told what to do, there may be a reassuring sense of security but also a lack of ownership or independence for those people to develop themselves
• and the more people are guided, or told what to do, the more they become accustomed to being guided and being told what to do, and ultimately reliant on it – so that, again, their independence to develop is impeded.

 

In addition, top—down approaches can be complicated to manage where the people on the ground operate under more than one set of policies and funding structures. In this next picture you can see how some of the people in the middle of the grass-roots level are working under multiple policies and funding structures – e.g. policies and funding from different government departments or government departments and other organisations.

And using a top—down approach to manage practice (how everybody does what they do) can be quite lumpy and slow to adapt. Eh? Well it takes a lot of time and effort for all of those approaches to be identified and analysed; it takes time and effort for them to be channelled and filtered; it takes a lot of time and effort to develop them into policies and funding structures; it takes a lot of time and effort for those policies to be drafted, consulted on, and then revised; and it takes a lot of time and effort to get the policies out, and for people working at the grass roots level to be able to act on them. And these policies have a habit of being established, then rolled out, and then perhaps dwindling over time. Then at some point, something changes, or something new is discovered that shakes things up – dissatisfaction builds up and the whole process has to be repeated. Big lumps – slow change.

An alternative to this top—down approach for managing practice, then, would be to have a process – an iterative and cumulative process – that grows and refines itself continuously: a process to which people are enabled to contribute and a process which provokes creativity and reflection.

Bottom—up

In a bottom—up approach the people doing the grass roots work and research share practice and knowledge with each other. It’s the job of the people in the overview positions, to help this happen, by encouraging practice sharing, monitoring overall trends and needs, brokering connections, supporting isolated minority groups etc. (In this last picture, I’ve tried to show this in the independent groups that form, as well as the green arrows for sharing practice and intelligence. The people in the overview positions feed their intelligence back into the practice on the ground.)

A bit of both

In reality, I suspect you’ll always need a balance of bottom—up and top—down but Youth Music, to take one example of an organisation that’s often in an overview position, can achieve far more by supporting and enabling practice-sharing between those it funds, than by trying to implement that practice itself. And it’s this process of practice-sharing, of developing and learning from each other, that we’re looking to support in this new Youth Music Programme – working with the organisations we fund to create communities of collaborative learning and development in and around music education.