David Baker is Associate Professor at the UCL Institute of Education, London where he is Programme Leader for the Music Education MA. In tandem with his research, MA programme leadership and teaching, David has a wide-ranging role including supervising and examining doctorates, and serving on the panel of ethics reviewers at the Institute. David also runs the Institute's Music Special Interest Group, a series of research seminars for staff members and students relating to music education and related fields presented by internationally-recognized scholars from the UK and overseas. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and, in 2018, became a fellowship assessor for UCL Arena. David’s other academic activities include peer-reviewing for a number of leading music education journals, writing book reviews, and he has published various research articles and book chapters on music education. From 2018 to 2022, he was also on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Community Music. David's co-authored book with Lucy Green on their Arts and Humanities Research Council "Visually-impaired musicians’ lives" work (see below) was published by Routledge in 2017. More recently, he has contributed chapters on disability and music to the Routledge international handbook of music psychology in education and the community (edited by Andrea Creech, Donald Hodges and Susan Hallam, 2021) and the Oxford handbook of care in music education (edited by Karin Hendricks, 2022).
David was Principal Investigator for "Visually-impaired musicians’ lives", a UCL project concerning blind and partially-sighted musicians funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2013–15, and supported by the Royal Academy of Music, London and Royal National Institute of Blind People, UK. This work has taken him as a researcher, seminar and conference presenter to Australia, India, Norway, Sweden and the USA. As an extension of this, he travelled to Chennai, Bangalore, Calcutta and New Delhi, India in 2016 visiting blind musicians and special schools with a British Council/Arts Council England grant. David has also collaborated with Mary Stakelum on a Research Endowment Trust Fund project at Reading University that explored primary teachers' conceptions of musical ability, 2011–12. He has been appointed UCL Honorary Senior Research Associate, 2016–19; and, in the past, held posts as Senior Research Officer at UCL, including his work for Lucy Green on the "Ear playing project". This was funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, 2011–12, and brought Green's "informal learning" approaches as applied in Musical Futures into the instrumental teaching studio.
special interests...
blind and partially-sighted musicians' lives and learning, visual impairment, music and education, accessible music technologies, musicians' life stages, playing music by ear, biographical research, narratives and life histories, musical ability, pedagogical training in the music conservatoire
contact details...
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