This study takes the music production course in popular music education at Chinese universities as its central focus. It examines the practicality-related issues presented in the teaching of this course and further analyzes the structural characterist...
This study takes the music production course in popular music education at Chinese universities as its central focus. It examines the practicality-related issues presented in the teaching of this course and further analyzes the structural characteristics of practicality in Chinese university popular music education from the relationships among course content, teaching methods, learning processes, and competency formation. The music production course integrates creativity, technology, practice, and industry relevance, and can therefore present, in a relatively concentrated way, the relationships among knowledge learning, technical training, and creative practice in popular music education. Therefore, conducting research with the music production course as the point of entry helps to understand the actual manifestations of practicality in Chinese university popular music education at the level of a specific course.
This study first conducts a literature review to theoretically analyze popular music education, music production courses, practicality-oriented teaching, and issues related to practical application in music education, and then develops the research framework on this basis. Subsequently, interview data are analyzed using thematic analysis. The interview participants include students, graduates, teachers, and practitioners from different experiential positions. Through initial coding, classification of candidate themes, and refinement of final themes, this study first identifies 16 candidate themes and further derives three final themes, namely teaching structure, learning process, and competency outcomes. The 16 candidate themes are then structurally analyzed around these three final themes. To examine the results of the thematic analysis in a larger sample, this study constructs a questionnaire based on the qualitative analysis and conducts a survey with a student sample, thereby further presenting the overall characteristics of the relevant issues among students and the relationships among the dimensions.
The findings show that teaching structure, as an external condition at the level of curriculum arrangement, is closely related to how students understand knowledge, organize techniques, and advance creative work during the learning process. Problems in the learning process, such as insufficient understanding, difficulties in integration, obstacles to transfer, and lack of feedback, are also further reflected at the level of competency outcomes. This indicates that the practicality problem in popular music education in Chinese universities is essentially a problem of insufficient connection among curriculum knowledge, technical training, and creative practice. The core of teaching practicality does not lie in whether practical content is included in the course or whether students complete classroom tasks, but in whether theoretical content, technical training, classroom experience, and learning support can enter into creative judgment, complete tasks, work production, and competency development.
Taking the music production course as its point of entry, this study reveals the specific manifestations and structural relationships of practicality-related issues in Chinese university popular music education. The findings not only help to understand the real problems in the teaching of music production courses, but also provide an analytical basis for reexamining the practicality of university popular music education from the continuous relationship among course provision, learning development, and competency formation. The practicality discussed in this study does not simply understand teaching objectives as employment adaptation, nor does it only emphasize whether practical content is included in the curriculum. For popular music education, practicality lies more importantly in whether students can understand knowledge, organize techniques, and gradually form judgment, expression, and action abilities in real tasks and creative processes. Future improvements in university popular music education should place greater emphasis on establishing stable connections among course content, practical tasks, feedback mechanisms, project-based training, and work production, thereby more effectively supporting the formation of students’ creative ability, practical application ability, and capacity for sustainable development.