From credit requirement to meaningful learning: novice university students’ experiences and transformative learning in a brass band course

This study examines how a university brass band course, initially undertaken by novice students to fulfil a co-curricular credit requirement, evolved into a site of meaningful social learning and personal transformation. Drawing on written reflective narratives produced by undergraduate participants with no formal musical background, the study explores intensive brass band training as an embodied and collective social practice rather than a purely technical musical activity. Using Experiential Learning and Transformative Learning as sensitising theoretical lenses, the analysis focuses on how discipline, bodily coordination, time management, emotional regulation, and collective responsibility were gradually internalised through rehearsal routines and public performance. Students’ reflections reveal a marked shift in perception: from viewing the course as an external obligation to recognising it as a demanding yet formative experience that reshaped their understanding of effort, capability, and learning itself. Rather than framing learning as the acquisition of musical skills alone, this article argues that the brass band functioned as a social formation through which novice learners encountered struggle, uncertainty, and interdependence. These experiences prompted critical self-reflection and reconfigured students’ assumptions about participation, commitment, and self-worth. By situating co-curricular music training within broader anthropological discussions of experience, discipline, and transformation in contemporary higher education, the study contributes to understandings of learning as lived and socially embedded practice.