Year-End Reflection on Teaching, Research, and Supervision

This past year marked a genuine paradigm shift for me. Not in the superficial sense of adding more credentials or outputs, but in the deeper work of clarifying my research voice, my pedagogic stance, and the relationship between my teaching, research, and supervision. I have come to understand more clearly how these three dimensions must cohere if the work is to be sustainable and meaningful. At the same time, I began to recognise what was no longer serving me, including certain forms of non-higher-education teaching and peripheral professional commitments that diluted focus rather than deepened practice. That discernment did not come from ambition, but from lived experience and accumulated reflection.

One outcome of this shift has been a more settled sense of who I aim to be as an educator. I have occupied many positions within the musical ecosystem. I have been the elitist jazz musician, convinced that technical excellence alone justified authority. I have also been the working professional who wakes early, honours commitments, and understands that responsibility extends beyond the stage. I have played in nightclubs, bistros, and informal venues, and I have encountered both inflated egos and genuine mastery among peers and seniors alike. These experiences have gradually dismantled any remaining attachment to pedagogies rooted in intimidation or endurance. I no longer believe in hard knocks as a default teaching strategy, nor in transmission as a one-way act. While I have a great deal of knowledge and experience to transmit, I now place equal weight on listening, adaptation, and the ethical responsibility of remaining human. This includes practical choices, such as not staying out late at gigs when I know the following day requires full presence for my students.

Teaching across institutions has also clarified a misconception I encounter frequently, particularly within local narratives around work and productivity. The assumption is that such breadth reflects income-driven hustle or opportunism. In reality, my motivation is neither financial nor reactive. I teach across different contexts because each allows me to engage distinct but interconnected dimensions of musicianship and pedagogy. Jazz, popular music, ensemble training, research supervision, and curriculum development are not interchangeable domains, and no single institution accommodates all of them meaningfully. My trajectory reflects a deliberate refusal to become a one-dimensional practitioner and a commitment to continuity rather than accumulation.

The phrase that best captures my professional identity is practitioner–scholar–pedagogue. I do not teach merely as a by-product of expertise, nor do I research in abstraction from practice. My work is grounded in Practice-as-Research, in which embodied musical practice, reflective inquiry, and pedagogic design are treated as mutually constitutive forms of knowledge rather than as separate activities. This orientation demands that teaching itself be approached as a craft, requiring attentiveness to learning processes rather than simply to content delivery. It is this commitment to how learning happens that underpins my supervision and curriculum work.

Across undergraduate and postgraduate contexts, a recurring issue presents itself regardless of institutional culture or student profile. There is a persistent underestimation of the academic process itself. Concepts such as criticality, framework, and scholarly positioning are often treated as procedural hurdles rather than epistemic practices to be internalised. As a result, students delay engaging seriously with academic writing, citation, and argumentation until assessment pressure forces urgency, by which point meaningful learning becomes compressed and reactive rather than developmental.

A parallel pattern appears in musical learning. Attributes such as talent, creativity, and inspiration are frequently invoked, yet they obscure what actually enables progress. What matters is not effort in the abstract, but intelligent, economical work. Sustainable development depends on understanding how to move efficiently from one stage to another without unnecessary struggle or burnout. In both music and research, progress accelerates when learners grasp underlying structures rather than attempting to manage multiple layers of complexity simultaneously.

My teaching, therefore, places sustained emphasis on process. I consistently ask students to articulate what they typically execute automatically, whether in muscle memory, ensemble interaction, or research decision-making. When students are stuck, the cause is rarely a lack of ability. More often, it is an attempt to resolve too many variables at once. Breaking work into intelligible components allows confidence and fluency to emerge incrementally. This applies equally to improvisation, ensemble playing, and academic writing.

One position I take explicitly with students is a refusal to romanticise passion or perseverance as guarantees of success. While commitment matters, thoughtful positioning, self-knowledge, and sustainability are equally critical. Unexamined effort can lead to exhaustion rather than growth. The same principle applies to emerging tools and methodologies, including artificial intelligence. Used uncritically, they obscure learning. Treated as craft, governed by ethics and intention, they can sharpen rather than replace judgement.

Perhaps the most unambiguous indication that this year’s recalibration has been productive lies in how the work now feels. After long days of lectures, individual consultations, and supervision, I do not leave depleted or resentful. I leave tired, but fulfilled, which is a distinction that matters more to me now than any external marker of success.

As I look ahead, I am less concerned with acceleration than with coherence. I am focusing on deepening my understanding of the intellectual ancestry of my research, my contemporaries within practice-as-research, and the evolving landscape of music pedagogy in Singapore. These things take time to consolidate, and I am content to do that work quietly and thoroughly.

If there is anything I hope students carry with them in the long term, it is not a specific technique or outcome, but the experience of being heard, taken seriously, and guided with care. I end the year grateful, steady, and resilient, with a strong internal sense of direction that does not require constant external validation.