Date of Award
Spring 5-21-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA - Master of Arts
Department
Expressive Therapies
Advisor
Dr. Rebecca Zarate
Abstract
Self-awareness is considered a necessary competency and professional responsibility for graduate music therapy students to develop during their master’s training. However, few concretized methods have been established to support students in growing this skill. Existing research examining songwriting’s impact on music therapy students provides preliminary evidence that it can effectively foster self-awareness and facilitate personal growth, professional identity development, and processing of clinical experiences (Baker & Krout, 2012, 2011; Viega & Baker, 2019). This thesis continues to explore the connection between songwriting and self-awareness by investigating a student-created method designed for this research by the researcher-participant—a 25-year-old, white, female graduate music therapy student interning at a children’s hospital. The method was researched using Sultan’s (2020) humanistic heuristic inquiry design to contribute a direct student account to the current literature. The method yielded one song and two written reflections which were analyzed through musical microanalysis and inductive analysis. This revealed seven themes which were organized under two categories—Song as a Self-Created Container and Areas of Increased Self-Awareness. Results indicate that songwriting was effective in fostering several aspects the researcher-participant’s self-awareness. It was found that the method supported meaningful engagement with self-awareness by providing a multimodal iterative process. Findings imply that this method could be useful for students developing their self-awareness and supervisors supporting supervisees in that process. More research is needed to determine the generalizability of these results. Suggestions to improve the method for future use and research are provided.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Damore, Emily, "Fostering Self-Awareness Through Songwriting: Development and Heuristic Self-Inquiry of a Method for Graduate Music Therapy Students" (2022). Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses. 525.
https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/expressive_theses/525
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