Campus Review Vol 30. Issue 01 | January 2020 | Page 22

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.