November 2023 Community of Practice

Hello!

We had our final Community of Practice for 2023 at the beginning of the month - thank you to all who joined us. It was a really fruitful session and reminder of how important connecting with other group singing facilitators can be. Finding out about the groups each attendee is involved in is always interesting and this time we had some wonderful connections about groups for singing with Parkinson's. It was also great to have Dr Yoon Irons, PI of the Singing Side By Side Action Research project, join us.

In this session, we had a lovely pairing of someone looking for advice about how to get started using our toolkit, and someone who had extensively used our toolkit, and was able to share their tips and experience. The space for reflection and targeted questions at the end of each chapter were highlighted as particularly useful. We're very happy to receive this feedback and to hear that our toolkit is being used and shared.

Another important topic that came up was the diversity of members in various singing groups, and awareness (or lack thereof) of different types of inclusivity. This led to discussions about expectations from the singing group members themselves, and ways to manage this, such as having formal agreements with them. The final chapter of our toolkit is dedicated to this topic and offers a guide towards creating a Culture Document with a group.

We also discussed the role of having a committee or other specially designated members within a group, in addition to the facilitator, to give members a point of contact for any issues that may come up. Having a choice of means of communication, such as a book to write in anonymously, as well as directly speaking to someone, was considered very valuable. This overlapped with how to set boundaries as a group singing facilitator, including the theme of sharing contact information with members.

Related to the above was balancing setting boundaries with creating a safe space and environment of belonging. The aim of any particular singing group was considered central to working towards this - is the priority to have a welcoming social space with singing as the main activity, or is a good sound and performance the key aim of the group?

On the more practical side of things, we discussed the challenges of keeping a group running, especially with fewer members returning to singing sessions and rehearsals after COVID restrictions eased. We also touched on how the public profile of a singing group can affect who may be interested in joining, as well as how to keep a group active and dynamic beyond rehearsing and performing, with suggestions including going on social trips, collaborating with other organisations, or even organising flashmobs!

If any of these topics sound relevant to you, or you would like to share your feedback on the toolkit and your thoughts and concerns about inclusivity in singing groups, please do join us for our next community of practice! Details to be posted soon.

In the meantime feel free to connect through our social media platforms, or get in touch directly via e-mail with any of the team present at the Community of Practice (Yoon Irons y.irons@derby.ac.uk, Lewis Hou lewis@scienceceilidh.com, Alexia Karageorgis alexia@scienceceilidh.com) or with attendees that were happy to have their contact info shared (Steve Barbe rwcmstevebarbe@yahoo.co.uk, website http://roywellscollageofmusic.org/index.html).