The research will take place at the Aventurijncollege in Bergen op Zoom. At this school I (Cynthia) have been working as a music teacher since March 2020. The Aventurijncollege is a school for secondary special education for students between the ages of 12 and 18 with vmbo (preparatory secondary vocational education) level who need extra support on behavior and / or social-emotional development. If appropriate education at a regular school does not suit a student enough, they can go to specialized education. The students at The Aventurine College follow diploma-oriented education. This means that most students obtain a high school diploma and move on to further education. The Aventurijncollege strives to keep the curriculum as similar as possible to regular secondary education, but there are adjustments to provide the students with their extra support. For example, the students receive all basic subjects (such as Dutch, mathematics, arithmetic, English, etc.) from one teacher, the mentor, in the same room. In addition, the classes consist of a maximum of 13 students. These are the biggest differences compared to regular continuing education where students with an average of 23 are in one class and each receive lessons from subject teachers in different classrooms (The Aventurine College, 2022; School guide Het Aventurijncollege 2022-2023, 2022).
The Aventurine College has the following vision: "The Aventurine College wants to offer its students, often with very complex problems, education that meets the various specialist needs and educational assistance questions they have. It is important that every student, regardless of the complexity of the problem, is given the space to develop in order to be positively powerful in society. It is very important for the development of our students that chain partners and parents are involved in the educational offer(School guide Het Aventurijncollege 2022-2023, 2022)".
At the Aventurine College, a development perspective plan is made for each student. This describes the expected outflow destination and the outflow level and which educational goals a student should be able to achieve. They work closely with parents/guardians and various cooperation partners.
The Aventurine College currently has 148 students divided into 18 classes. Students of The Aventurine College follow 3700 hours of education in 4 years. This is divided into 33 lessons of 45 minutes per week. Of these 33 hours, all students aged 1 to 4 receive one hour of music lessons per week from a subject teacher in a music room in the school. The lessons are given according to the professional plans that were last adjusted in 2020 (see appendix 1).
The students at Het Aventurijncollege are between 12 and 18 years old and need extra support in the field of behavior and / or social-emotional development. This support cannot be offered at a regular secondary school. The students at Het Aventurijncollege have this support because of different types of problems such as severe forms of ADHD, autism, or trauma. As a result of this problem, our students show certain behaviors. At The Aventurine College they try to guide the students in a positive way in their behavior. For these students, creative subjects such as music and cultural artistic education are very exciting, which can lead to negative behavior. In these courses, it is also an extra challenge for the teacher to properly supervise all students. At times, certain development goals play a major role, which can sometimes be at the expense of the common musical goal in music lessons.
In addition, a lot is asked of the school skills of the students in music lessons. The students work with all kinds of different materials, run into different problems that they have to solve, and the students have to concentrate while there are many different types of stimuli in music lessons. It is therefore important for this student to find a good balance between structure and predictability, and the creative development of the students.
For this research, it was decided to give the lessons to class 2C. This is a class with 12 students in the second year of education at the VMBO TL level.