The Center for Music-In-Education NewsBlog is a living portfolio of work done by Guided Internship and MIE Concentration students at New England Conservatory.
NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Chris Watford, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Warren Senders’sCross-Cultural Approaches to Music-In-Educationcourse this Fall. For more blog entries regarding this semester’s run of the course, and previous years’ runs, please click here.
Hello NewsBlog readers! I am doing a guided internship this semester as a Documentation Specialist for Warren Sender’s course Cross-Cultural Approaches to MIE. My goals are to examine the roles of both teacher and student within a classroom setting and to collect evidence of the way in which both parties learn from each other. I am also interested in observing and documenting various strategies for effective teaching, and inversely, for effective learning.
What’s This Course About?
The course examines, through immediate experience, how people throughout the world intrinsically learn from one another. It also opens the doors to understanding how cultural structures in education shape the way in which we learn and, eventually, how we will teach. We also focus on understanding how to take what a student already knows and use that as a building block for further learning.
In the course of each two hour class, various activities are performed that demonstrate a number of different aspects embedded within the learning process. The class learns traditional Indian songs, builds instruments, practices the teaching of activities to the class, and participates in group discussions that center on our collective observations from previous activities and experiences. After each class, the students are expected to compose a written reflection on their experience and how it relates to what they are doing outside, whether it be performing, practicing, teaching, or just aspects of general living. The idea is that, by the end of the semester, they will have compiled an in-depth ’syllabus’ that outlines specifically what they have achieved and observed throughout the term (that also makes it possible to read simultaneous reflections from the same class in order to compare our collective learning).
My Guided Internship Plan
Having already participated in and completed this course, I have an understanding of the end product. My plan is to observe the process again from a new perspective and to gather visual, audio, and textual information throughout the term. This will be compiled into a final presentation that focuses on the dynamic between learner and teacher, and stems from the hypothesis that they are both equal and similar parts of the same system, rather than opposing ends. In addition, I will also be exploring aspects of oral tradition along with different ‘cultural’ and scientific approaches to learning (genetic, morphogenetic family fields, etc.).
Warren and I will be collaborating extensively throughout the term in order to produce a multi-media project to encompass the collective learning of the class and to highlight various aspect of effecting teaching/learning. I will keep you up to date with new information and media as each class approaches, so please check back frequently for new posts! I am looking forward to an exciting year!
NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the first (of hopefully more) to share documentation from the Fall 2008 semester of Anne Hallmark’s Teaching Music History course, a MIE cross-listed course. The assignment given was for students to present a ten-minute straight lecture on a piece of their choice, then watch the videotape of their presentation and write a reflection/analysis following the viewing of their tape. This report comes from CMIE Program Coordinator Randy Wong.
Hello, CMIE NewsBlog readers! This semester I am taking Anne Hallmark’s “Teaching Music History course” and will be acting as one of its Documentation Specialists—that is, posting my class experiences to the CMIE NewsBlog so that others in the MIE community can get a bird’s eye view of the course, and articulating my work in a public forum with the hope of receiving constructive feedback, etc. Expect to read some more blog posts from me over this semester. I will also make a MIE portfolio for the course as an example of what a MIE portfolio would look like for a cross-listed course. I look forward to your comments and feedback!
The Assignment
In our first class, Dr. Hallmark announced that we’d each have to give a short lecture on the piece of our choice. I think she made this assignment as a ‘diagnostic’, of sorts, so that we could each figure out what we already bring to the table and set some goals for the semester. Our assignment had three parts, and this post is a partial extrapolation of the second part. (I wrote a more fleshed-out analysis that you can download here). Here’s the assignment:
Give a short lecture to the class on a topic/piece of choice (and videotape that lecture).
Watch the videotape and write a reflection/analysis paper based on your reactions to the video.
Meet with the instructor for further discussion of your reactions and to set goals for the semester.
The presentation requirements, as I understood them, were open-ended: Choose a piece to introduce to your classmates. Use a ‘straight lecture’ format. Use of Powerpoint presentations, hand-outs, audio or video recordings, etc. would be allowed; the only real requirement would be that each presentation must fall strictly within ten minutes. Following each presentation, the floor would be opened for questions or comments from the audience (our classmates). Comments from the audience could pertain either to the lecture style and presentation attributes, or to the content itself.
Pre-Viewing Reflection on Lecture Success
As it is for many, pre-presentation anxiety is one of my faults. I think my biggest worry is getting up to present and either forgetting what I want to say, or trying to say it but not being articulate enough and thus getting a lot of blank stares. Ancillary worries are: rambling (in which main points and others get tangled, and so the audience doesn’t know what the presentation’s ‘take-aways’ are) and running out of time and having to leave off main or important points. Thus, I scripted my lecture… but at the risk of reading my presentation instead of actually presenting it. I know the audience caught on to this pretty quickly, but I might not know until viewing the tape what reactions they each made, and how that affected the overall quality of my presentation.
The Video of My Lecture
Post-Viewing: Analysis of Videotape & Goals for the Semester
The same thoughts I had post-presentation (pre-viewing) applied when I watched the tape. Although the tape does not show the audience while I was presenting, my guess is that if it did, there would be body language from the audience that shows them being ‘turned off’ by my reading from the script vs. me presenting in an organic way.
The videotape also reveals how my body language plays into the way I suspect my audience interprets the tone and formality of my lecture. For much of the video, I am leaning on my hands, slanted diagonally towards the lectern/computer, and the eye contact I make is in short spurts—not for long periods, neither with audience members nor with the projected slides. This coupled with my script reading was surely a turn-off and disengaged my audience.
My main goal for this semester is to feel comfortable giving lectures, short and long, without the crutch of a script or extensive notes. I have long felt comfortable internalizing subject matter and leading discussions on it and buttressing these conversations with audio-visual material. But giving straight lectures is a different animal, and it’s a skill I must master if I continue public speaking in any context.
James Wilkinson, author of the “Varieties of Teaching” essay in The Art and Craft of Teaching (Margaret Gullette, Editor), refers to the varying skills a successful teacher needs:
A good lecturer may experience problems leading a successful discussion; the discussion leader skilled in asking questions may feel ill at ease when conducting a monologue from the lecture podium. But it should be a teacher’s goal to master the full scale of teaching styles, and to know the strengths and drawbacks of each (Gullette, 1984).
This straight-lecture format was definitely good practice for me, because as much as the topic and content is put front and center, so are my methods of organizing and presenting that material. I suppose another crutch I have is to put the student at the center of the conversation; after all, there is a huge push for education these days to be learner-centric rather than topic-centric, and my own philosophy and background in education is from that standpoint (learner-centric) as well. So, this was all a good exercise.
Further Thoughts
As an aside, I think that this course (like other education-focused courses at New England Conservatory) is an important parallel to the school’s performance-based curriculum; particularly because it encourages budding teachers to freely and openly explore and develop each’s own personal teaching style. So often teachers-to-be (also known as pre-professional teachers) are thrown into classrooms with little preparation or minimal chance to practice teaching.
While at NEC, I spent many hours practicing pieces in small motifs, and then slowly linking those motifs together to create longer phrases. Those phrases then had to be linked to each other, and so any transition that occurred between phrases would have to be carefully planned and executed, in accordance with accompanying parts, harmonic structure, rhythm, and form. In other words, it would all have to make sense. I have since come to understand the art of presenting and teaching to be no different. As is stated by Wilkinson, part of the trickiness of lecturing is in the way that one must analyze the subject matter and present it in a logical, flowing, way:
How to argue a point and not simply present data; how to link arguments in a logical chain; how to sum up with a sure sense of what is essential and what is merely extrinsic to your case are skills that require coaching and practice. Students need to be helped to present their ideas with grace and to strive for the control, confidence, and economy of means that help make what Alfred North Whitehead once termed a “sense of style.” (Ibid.)
I have already spent many nights working on this from the standpoint of the written word, and have slowly begun spinning this experience out, into other forms of teaching that I am comfortable with: double bass & music reading lessons; ensemble coaching; and informal lecturing on Exotica music and the Hawaiian culture. However, what I need more practice with is working in more formal venues, with a larger and/or mixed audience, and in extended time periods. Thus, I am excited to conduct the 50-minute classes that are part of the assignments for this course, and hope to further develop the “sense of style” that Wilkinson, Whitehead, and others often refer to as being a crucial characteristic of effective teaching (Ibid).
The Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework has been around for over a decade. As far as I know, the term was first coined when during the years I served as the Founding Director of Research at the Leonard Bernstein Center for the Arts in Nashville (along with Eric Booth, Teaching Artist Director, David Steiner, former Head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Alexander Bernstein) where the term was used to understand the Leonard Bernstein’s persona and his life’s work as a synthesis of his artistry, teaching, and scholarly publications and lectures.
Nine years ago at NEC, I worked with Alan Fletcher (now CEO and President of the Aspen School of Music and Festival) to establish the Artist-Teacher-Scholar (ATS) Framework as the conceptual framework for NEC new Music-in-Education Program. It was the ATS framework – employed as an educational model for MIE students at NEC – that attracted years of federal funding to help NEC establish its Music-in-Education Program and the Research Center, representing the two key components of the Center for Music in Education.
Today I understand that the success of both NEC programs is aligned with the inter-related principles of the ATS framework. That is to say, as many students develop musically over time, they become increasingly interested in both the ‘teaching of the musical arts’ and the ‘artistry of teaching’ in schools or in outreach programs regardless of what career path they choose. And eventually it is not unusual for these musicians to recognize the importance of building both a personal ‘scholarship of artistry’ and a ‘scholarship of teaching’ as they develop career paths.
As evidence of this ongoing progression, NEC faculty whose courses count toward the MIE program – all highly trained and experienced musicians – engage in scholarship that takes the form of publishing, lectures, research, advocacy, community leadership, curriculum development, outreach programs, assessment, social action and policy shaping through our local programs and national collaborations relevant to music in education and our society. I believe that the ATS model helps to explain the genisis and effectiveness of these faculty initiatives.
Further evidence of the impact of this framework can be understood through changes in institutional policy. Nine years after the creation of NEC MIE programs and its research center, there are now guided intern programs, concentration programs in Music in Education, and even new research institutes in our partnering organizations nationally. Googiing on the internet I discovered there are now Music-in-Education programs established internationally independent of our work. I think these events have not occurred in absentia of an evolving conception of the artist’s developing persona as an artist-teacher-scholar.
Personally, the conception of the ATS clarifies the need for research and assessment in music-in-education practices. For me, artistry and education have limited impact on public policy, practices or leadership without ongoing research that is both rigorously conducted and aimed at practical significance for musicians, teachers, parents, administrators and students. Without having to arrive at a lock-step view of the ATS framework as a model for NEC faculty or students, I think it is fair to say that Patrick Keppel, Randy Wong, Lyle Davidson, Warren Senders, and Paul Burdick and our many other colleagues at NEC and in our partnering schools, see this framework as a driving force behind NEC’s national or local initiatives, Journal publications and the presentation of student portfolio work coming out of the NEC MIE and outreach programs.
I look forward to seeing more alums presenting their work on the www.mieatnec.org website and blogs. I hope everyone reading our new Journal in May will be stimulated through seeing the work of fellow MIE interns in other institutions. Nonetheless, it is my fondest hope that anyone investigating the publications, student, and alum work will appreciate the evolving forms of artistry, teaching and scholarship represented by NEC faculty and students as a resource and inspiration for advancing music in education and our society.
- Larry Scripp
Larry Scripp is Director of NEC’s Center for Music-In-Education and Executive Director of the MIE National Consortium. Scripp is also on NEC’s Music Theory and Music Education faculties, and is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
I wanted to impart some knowledge I gained from my experiences in Larry Scripp’s Graduate Seminar class this week. After having time to reflect and create a descriptive review of the videos posted last week, we (as a class) watched the videos, and came up with some pretty interesting discoveries.
In live performance, it was agreed upon by the class that Shanshan’s clarinet playing was much too quiet to balance Vito’s voice. However, the balance was the opposite in the video; we could barely hear Vito’s recitation. This brought in the question, “How were we measuring balance to begin with in the live performance?” I believe that we could take in the whole picture when it was live, meaning that we were determining balance between not only the sounds and their volumes, but by the actions/gestures as well. Vito was simply more animated in person, which contributed to him sounding louder. In viewing the video, however, one is unable to control what or whom they are looking at, so it then falls into the hands of the cinemitographer. This third person now has complete control of how the live performance is being presented whether he/she knows it or not!
These elements came up in class, because after watching the videos, we were all left with a hollowed feeling of what we experienced live. So, we wanted to understand why that happened.
Here’s a challenge: View the first two videos. Try to imagine, if you can, seeing this performance live and then seeing the video. What are your observations? Also, since you probably did not see the performance live, try to describe how a live performance might take away from your first experience… Enjoy.
-Brynn
Brynn Rector is a graduate trumpet performance major at New England Conservatory, and Research Assistant for the Center for Music-in-Education.
In the world of education, there are numerous methods and styles of teaching. Those involved with the Music-in-Education department here at New England Conservatory believe that music can be used to heighten a student’s learning of other subjects, such as mathematics and language arts. We call this method integration.
In Larry Scripp’s Graduate Music in Education Seminar last week, one student presented her idea of a lesson plan combining music and literature. Shanshan’s lesson plan involved reading a children’s story along with music, while recording the students’ reactions. Then, reading the same story without music, and comparing those reactions to reactions from the first. Keep in mind that the narrator had never seen the story before.
The first time through, Shanshan played clarinet in duet with Vito’s narration. As music students, it was obvious to us that some, if not all, of the music was taken from preexistent sources. Professor Scripp then introduced the class to an amazing method of observation called “Descriptive Review.” The first step in “descriptive review” is to only take note of what you see, without attaching a judgment to it. This step was very difficult for the class, since we were not allowed to follow one train of thought through to the end. However, it did provide us with unbiased observations, which in the end can prove to be of more use.
The next step is to ask all of the questions of which you would like to know the answers. In the same vein as the first step, we were only allowed to ask questions and were not given the answers to them. This initially left us frustrated, but eventually led us to more creative questions once we got past the obvious ones.
The Descriptive Review experience was such an eye-opening one that I wanted to share it with you. Check out the video. . . Perhaps attempt your own Descriptive Review?
One of my internships for the Music-in-Education Concentration has been working for Larry Scripp as a TA. Last spring I was TA for the MIE511: Guided Internship Seminar and this year I’ve been a TA for his two solfege classes: Solfege for Singers in the fall and Advanced Solfege this spring. Under his guidance, one of the evolving roles that I have played has been to facilitate an ongoing discussion and reflection about the class materials outside of class time.
One of the core inquiry questions of MIE is “how does reflection enrich the learning process?” and so my inquiry has been “how can electronic communications media — a blog or an email list — promote and facilitate class engagement and reflection in between class sessions? how can I as TA use these mediums to keep the class engaged in reflective learning?”
It is my experience that for a given amount of “class material” (time spent in class), a given student can extract a wide range of learning from it depending on how much processing and reflection you do. My most compelling example of this comes from my experiences with trumpet lessons: Eric Berlin, my teacher at UMass-Amherst, recorded all of our lessons and gave us a CD of them. Many weeks I would listen back to the tape of the week and write reflectively in a journal I kept for just that purpose and I was always amazed at the clarity, direction, and insight that this practice gave me. I literally got more out of every lesson because I picked up on a lot of stuff that I completely missed the first time through.
So, as a TA, I have been working to try to promote this kind of reflective inquiry in between class sessions. It’s actually much more challenging this year with the solfege classes which meet three times a week (Mon-Wed-Fri) rather than the MIE class last year which met just once a week: Because the class already meets three times, there is a sense of the class discussion carrying forward without need for this reflective thinking.
In thinking about the barriers to this kind of reflection, I feel that creating the artifacts of class material is the biggest barrier for most people: Creating recordings, video tapes, or taking notes of what happened in class. But with today’s technology, many of these things have recently become significantly easier! Using an Edirol R-09 all-digital, flash-based MP3 recorder and Blogger.com’s blogging software, I have been posting recordings and reflective summaries of every class session. For example, When people miss a class session, they now have several options. A visit to the class blog will give them the chance to listen to the entire class, read my class summary, and see any comments or questions that their peers have posted. In general, this means being caught up-to-speed on what has been going on. (Certainly they miss out on visuals, but I believe that someday soon the technology will be in place for flash-based digital cameras to take hour-long movies and transfer them as files across a USB cable in a reasonable amount of time).
The blog has also be a very effective way to distribute class materials. While we still hand out materials to the class, having a scanned copy or digital original of whatever we’ve handed out available on the blog has been immensely helpful to those folks who have missed class on one day or another.
Unfortunately, it has been very hard to encourage the “lateral discussions” which these technologies provide for: Both email lists and blogs have the capacity to enable rich and wide-ranging reflective discussions between class members about the topics. Each blog post can be followed up by comments and each email can spawn an entire discussion which everyone can participate in, and the participation by the all members of class would contribute to everyone’s learning and understanding. Shy of making it a hard, fast, and graded assignment, however, I’ve been largely unsuccessful in launching this kind of culture of class reflection.
So, these are two uses for digital technologies (recordings, blogs, emails) to enhance the class discussion along the principles of MIE, but I wonder what other ways can our 21st century tools enable a classroom to extend beyond the traditional meeting form and become a more effective and enriched experience? And what kinds of “best practice” strategies exist that encourage and facilitate more peer discussions through these mediums? Lastly, if there is a balance between “class material” and “reflection of class material” wherein the amount of learning is a product of both (material times reflection), what ratio of material to reflection is optimal? At what point does tilting the relationship toward reflection and discussion start to diminish the amount of learning?
In the spirit of lateral discussion, I’m especially interested in what MIE Interns think about these inquires. I know that both Kristen & Brynn (my fellow MIE Documentation Specialists) have been involved in this kind of work — or I’d be really excited to hear student perspectives from someone in one of these classes.
-Fred
Fred Sienkiewicz is a graduate trumpet performance major, MIE Concentration student, and Research Assistant for the Music-in-Education National Consortium.
During these past few weeks I’ve noticed an underlying theme in my MIE experiences. I didn’t recognize its significance at first, but I really think this might be a thread worth exploring. My first introduction to the idea came when I brought a piece from my repertoire to Larry’s Solfege for Singers class. The piece, Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Sea Eagle” for solo horn, is truly intimidating. Take a look at this excerpt from the first movement. How am I supposed to tackle this thing? Larry suggested all the standards; practice the syllables with no rhythm, practice the syllables in rhythm, and the like. Then he suggested that I practice singing it and then playing it with no accidentals. At first, I thought that was pretty pointless. Of course I could do it without accidentals! It’s the accidentals that make it so hard. Wouldn’t that eliminate the whole context, the point of the piece?
But then, Larry went on a related tangent in our MIE Intro class of 11/7. Paraphrasing, he said that if you can improvise in the context or style of a piece of music you will have a greater knowledge of that piece. If not, perhaps you have only a didactic understanding, such that any performance is either right or wrong, follows the rules or doesn’t. But instead, consider other pathways of inquiry that can give dimension to a performance. And indeed, in Solfege we recently improvised in the style of Palestrina, finding that it actually made singing Palestrina easier. How fascinating, that changing something and intentionally performing it wrong, altering the decisions the composer made, could make the written piece easier!
And in fact, we spent the entirety of today’s Intro to MIE class proving that point. One of our recent assignments was to learn Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.” (Score excerpted here.) We were charged with recording it twice, once as written and once with a different technique. Some people played the piece on pitched water glasses, other people sang the parts with two voices sounding a third apart, and so on. These multiple representations of the same piece colored our understanding of the piece. Today we broke it down even farther, performing it with two drum circles and solo gong. One circle played only beat 1 of each grouping, the other circle played beat 2, and the gong player intoned the only beat 3 in the measure. It was really difficult to stay together, especially then when one group or the other moved to the second measure and the parts were no longer in sync. But this greater understanding of the piece made it easier then when the drum circles played the parts as written, moving forward measure by measure and switching parts within each measure on command. Each new representation of the piece, each variation gave the class a greater understanding of the piece, such that our performance and our interpretation were much more convincing and informed.
I asked Larry after class about how this all relates to my Peter Maxwell Davies piece, and his comment was that we need to make our unplayable pieces playable quickly to begin working on them. Whatever route takes you to that point is a good one. So whether it be an exercise to make an unplayable piece easier so that some day I might perform it as written, or to make a tricky piece harder in practice so the performance is improved, consider this path of education in your own music. What we do can have so much more life than right or wrong.
-Kristen
Kristen Dirmeier is a graduate horn performance major. She has served as a Teaching Assistant for Larry Scripp’s “Introduction to Music-in-Education” course, and currently works in the MIE Research Center as a Documentation Specialist and Portfolio Archivst-Analyst.
