industry & research
campusreview.com.au
You gotta
learn a living
Educators have a duty to impart
passion, curiosity and agency
in their students, expert says.
By Kate Prendergast
T
here’s a lot of excitable talk frothing
around the unsettled nature of
modern work. We are by now
acutely aware that young graduates don’t
march down a single corridor into a
well-defined and well-mapped job future.
Instead, their careers are a maze of options
and challenges, with some of the twists
impossible to anticipate. People hop
between roles, swing on the monkey bars
of opportunity, juggle hobbies and at-home
lives, and find themselves in fields that
perhaps didn’t even exist a few years before.
To describe this situation as new,
though, wouldn’t be entirely accurate if we
consider a longer historical viewpoint. So
argues Dawn Bennett, professor of higher
education and director of the Developing
Employability and Creative Workforce
Initiatives at Curtin University.
What we’d call ‘traditional careers’ –
defined by stability, a full-day working week
and relative skills staticity – are really a 300-
year “blip” in history, “where in some sectors,
banking is an obvious one, the idea of a job
for life was there”.
20
“Before that, it was unheard of,” Bennett
says. “And it will be unheard of again, I think.”
Yet, while the job market has changed, as
well as societal norms, universities haven’t
quite caught up.
“We don’t prepare people [for professional
life] terribly well,” she adds. Unless you
happen to be in the arts sector – perennially
eclectic – “it’s something that a lot of
the generation who are lecturing didn’t
encounter”.
Beyond equipping students with technical
expertise and specialty knowledge in their
areas of interest, what is equally critical is to
instil in them “the ability and a willingness
to learn”.
“You have to learn a living,” she puts it
snappily. “Because it’s the learning that will
enable you to go from one thing to the next.”
This was a key finding of a recent
paper looking at the professional lives of
classical musicians published by Bennett
and Guadalupe López-Íñiguez, a Spanish
musician and interdisciplinary researcher
based in Finland. (Bennett herself had a
former life as a freelance violist in the UK.)
The study, ‘A Lifespan Perspective on
Multi-professional Musicians’, interviewed
several (anonymous) world-class European
musicians in their late to mid careers. Many
recounted how they had inherited the idea
that the pinnacle of achievement – and the
end goal they should be singularly aspiring
towards – was that of an international soloist.
You could think of it as the NBA star of the
classical music universe.
While this notion wasn’t explicitly
encouraged at their institutions of learning, it
was implicit in the curricula and competition
circuit, and defined their trajectory up
until a point. Often it was only when they
were exposed to diversity outside their
formal learning environment – through
an exchange program, for example – that
the interviewees said they were able to at
last understand what kind of musician they
wanted to be, and how they would set their
compass to get there.
This realisation could take precious years,
and precipitate something of an existential
crisis when it hit.
What saw them through, and helped them
achieve the renown they enjoy, came down
to their ability to cultivate and develop “an
enterprising or pioneering mindset”. Many
engaged in new learning, or developed their
skills in unfamiliar contexts.
This often meant they had to actively
challenge perceived hierarchies of success
and be critical about the high-pressure cycle
of competitions which tend to enshrine a
certain type of music, played in a certain
way. They also had to have the courage
to pursue a path which aligned with their
personal and professional values, eschewing
the stereotypical rubrics.