Supporting Motivation in Music Education

As with other school subjects, music students can be motivated and engaged, or they can be unmotivated and disengaged. Such reactions reflect more than just individual differences between students, as they are also reactions to the social environment and classroom climate in which music education takes place. A social context—be it the classroom or a tutor–tutee relationship—can vitalize and nurture students' inner motivational resources, resulting in enthusiastic engagement, or it can neglect and frustrate students' inner motivational resources, resulting in alienation and disaffection. A theory of student motivation that is especially well suited to explain such engagement versus disaffection is self-determination theory. This article, which focuses on this perspective in order to introduce its insights to the music education community, discusses both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of students.