Music is sounds that are chosen and organised by an individual, in order to have meaning for them. The sounds may or may not be performed with or for one or more others in order to share the experience and the meaning of the sounds but they must be sounds, not abstract symbols, to be fully received and understood. Musical sound must, therefore, be at the heart of every music lesson.
I want my students to be able to create and organise sounds in a way that is meaningful for them and also for their audience. I want them to be able to get inside a piece of music and hear, experience and observe how it works; to understand the tools and techniques that creators use to create, organise, develop and share their musical ideas and statements – what Green (2008) refers to ‘inter-sonic meaning’– and then to use these tools and techniques in their own act of creating.
I have tended to use listening and performance as the investigation mode, while composition and performance have been the products that my students use to demonstrate their learning. My students and I can benefit from using technology as a tool to support learning in all three musical processes – creating, performing and responding to music. I can see how technology has the ability to open up composing-based investigations activities to more sophisticated and reflective level of exploration.
The use of play – playing with sounds, playing with effects, playing with interpretation and playing with ideas and meaning – are all aspects of my classroom environment that can incorporate, and be enhanced by, the use of technology. Technology allows for what composer and educator, Trevor Wishart, and others refer to as “immediacy” (Green, 2008, p. 60), an aural-based, direct contact with the music, not blocked or mediated by notation. This immediacy is not dependent on technology but it is supported and enriched by it. The computer is, indeed, an instrument – a means of giving expression to a student’s creative mind. The array of sounds and pre-recorded loops allow students to quickly and easily create relatively sophisticated pieces that mimic what they hear in their musical culture.
William (2011) expresses a common theme in the contemporary understanding of pedagogy. “The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners and their peers to ensure that learning is proceeding in the intended direction” (p.50). Green (2008) refers to the experience of an effective musical learning environment as a ‘celebration’ (p. 88).
I am a learner as well as a teacher, while my pupils are teachers as well as learners. Yet the challenge from Sugata Mitra (2103) and Lucy Green (2008) that children can teach themselves and accomplish high standards of engagement and competence has caused me to re-think my approach to what constitutes an effective learning environment and embrace the concept of informal learning.
I have long held the view that all music is good music if it moves you (physically, emotionally, cognitively and spiritually). I also recognise that the effect of music is largely due to enculturation. As teachers we are expected to introduce children to the foundations of their society and culture – not in an imperialist or dogmatic way – but with a view to connecting students with the creative spirits that have shaped, recorded and reflected that culture and to assist them to understand the significance and purpose of music within its cultural and social context.
Education is also about nurturing children and young people. I believe that this involves protecting children from language, images, ideas, attitudes and actions that can harm them emotionally, socially, cognitively and spiritually – Green’s ‘delineated meaning’ (2008, p. 87). ‘Critical musicality’ (Green, 2008, pp.83-84) is about challenging students’ thinking, expanding their empathy and understanding as well as enabling them to be creative problem solvers. Music is about enjoyment but it should also nourish the spirit. Music brings individual pleasure but it has the ability to create community. Music is about self-expression but it can enable a group to speak with one voice. Music is about identity – whether individual, cultural, sub-cultural or tribal – but it is also about a wider collective identity, sometimes referred to as our shared humanity or the human condition.
The privilege of connecting children with the great minds and spirits of all ages, opening their ears to the voice of others, giving flight to their imagining of the possible, requires music teachers to be courageous and discerning in their choice of music – knowing that it won’t always be popular and it won’t always have the stamp of “a classic”. In the music classroom, teacher and pupils are all members of the audience when music is being played. But the classroom context has the ability to alienate (Hein, 2015; Green, 2008, p. 90) and the teacher must be aware and adopt approaches that counter this negative effect.
As connectors, teachers are able to make new connections for students with familiar music from the students’ own culture, by creating effective learning environments in which the students have time to ‘celebrate’ the techniques and meaning of those familiar examples. Students then learn how to apply the knowledge and skills gained, in personally meaningful examples, to novel examples. They perceive continuity between the musical examples and experience both inclusiveness and diversity in the acceptance of their culture and the culture of others.
This connection of meaning in learning is the basis of a Relational Epistemology in which a student’s depth of knowledge is linked to the strength of the connections that they have in the learning process. These include the student’s relationship with the learning object (in this case a song or a musical skill); with the teacher who will guide and affirm their observing and creating; with the composer or songwriter through the music and with their fellow students as they perform together and for each other and join together to solve problems.
It is encouraging that technology has become a tool for creative collaboration, for communication and for creating an audience. These twenty-first century skills are at the core of music education and all are skills facilitated by technology. The twenty-first century music classroom is a place where these skills are valued and nurtured in ways that set an example of innovation and reflection for learning throughout the school and throughout life.
References
Green, L. 2008. Music, informal learning and the school: A new classroom pedagogy. Oxon: Routledge
Hein, E. (2015). The promise and perils of the digital studio. In S. A. Ruthmann & R. Mantie (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of technology and music education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mitra, Sugata. 2013. Build a School in the Cloud. Ted talk February 2013. Retrieved 19/01/2016 from https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud?language=en
William, D. 2011. Embedded: formative assessment . Moorabbin, Vic.: Hawker Brownlow Education
Saturday, February 4, 2017
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