From Inquiry to Investigation: Fundamental Learning Processes of Music in Education
I have always been intrigued about what makes teaching and learning “grab” and engage an individual. For me, this feeling came very early on; from a childhood experience with Mongolian yurts, to my advanced musical studies, my experiences with teaching and learning have been memorable and intense. As a high school student, I desired to take difficult classes, even when I knew that my final grade wouldn’t reflect what I had actually learned that semester. So when bass playing became my passion, and classes and homework seemed to create an insurmountable challenge, I was faced with a dilemma:
How could I use my performance artistry to enhance my learning in the classroom?
My first venture into the investigation of learning processes came as part of a class I was taking at New England Conservatory (where I earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Classical Double Bass Performance), taught by Dr. Larry Scripp. The class, an introductory course for NEC’s Music-In-Education program, opened my eyes to the importance of three concepts: process-based learning; Learning Through Music, a music-oriented approach to teaching using hands-on, interactive methods; and, most importantly, the notion of the conservatory student as an evolving Artist-Teacher-Scholar (A-T-S).
Although I am hardly a stranger to process-based or interactive learning methods, the way in which NEC’s Music-In-Education program framed these concepts helped me to bring more focus to my own efforts in teaching, learning, researching, and performing. Over the course of the past two years, I participated in several opportunities to implement my ideas in schools, both public and private, domestic and abroad.
The Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework presented me with opportunities I had never imagined possible; at NEC, performance majors are encouraged to teach subjects other than their instrument because the Artist-Teacher-Scholar model challenges students to find ways to link their performance artistry with scholarship and teaching.
A key example of this is a fellowship NEC gave me in Spring 2002 to teach Solfege at the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), a public high school near Fenway Stadium. Because it seemed that Solfege (a very traditional form of music pedagogy) would have no room for innovation, I found myself wondering, “how do I engage urban high school students in a centuries-old tradition of teaching music literacy?”
I found an answer when I experimented with a juxtaposition of Solfege with urban hip-hop music (like that by Jennifer Lopez, Eminem, and A Tribe Called Quest). Often, the class and I explored how bass, drum, synthesizer, and vocal tracks on pop tunes interact with one another harmonically and structurally, the same way that violins, violas, and cellos do in a string quartet or a Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and a Baritone does with a Bach Chorale. One of my favorite memories was a class in which we had dug head first into learning each of the rhythm section tracks in Solfege, explored how conventional Bach-like voice leading principles were followed, and then took the next step by improvising melodies that used the same voice-leading but sounded different. With my bass in hand, I accompanied my students as they spontaneously composed their own arrangements of Jennifer Lopez’s hit, “If You Had My Love” - not bad, if I may say, for students who previously had never had lessons in Solfege, improvisation, or composition. My experience at BAA, although only a semester long, demonstrated to me that teaching from a performance background can only help to further one’s teaching and learning experiences; for example, the importance of Bach’s voice leading rules, in order to be truly understood, need to be applied in a concrete way.
The Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework guided me as I journeyed to China in 2002, to teach English as a Second Language at South Ocean School Dalian’s Intensive English Immersion Camp, and as an emissary of American culture and Western teaching.
My China trip allowed me the unique opportunity to simultaneously implement the Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework and Learning Through Music model with students who had most likely never encountered their equivalents; in fact, the camp’s administration specifically wanted Western teachers who could teach using non-traditional methods.
One of the most interesting transformations my students and I observed were the elimination of accents from phonetic pronunciation in their English. Most of my students, since they were taught by non-native English speakers, came to camp with severe accents. But when we practiced singing simple conversational phrases, using familiar melodies, their foreign accents began to disappear. And disappear they did, as we took steps further by gradually eliminating the pitch element, so that their phrases really did become understandable. I also experimented with composing melodies that matched the conversational tonality of each phrase; for example, question phrases were marked by rising contours. Because my students’ overall English proficiency ranged from zero to moderate, implementing the Learning Through Music teaching model and Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework was not only helpful, but highly appropriate.
The Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework has guided me in one other way as well - scholarship. Both my teaching experiences at BAA and in China, in addition to the hands-on/interactive foci, allowed me to do extensive research regarding how students respond to multiple methods of teaching and learning. For example, at BAA, I made sure that the entire experience was documented by requiring that all my students keep journals of their learning; for me, journal writing has always been a key part of any successful teaching/learning experience. Initially, when I agreed to teach at BAA, I was more interested in the overall teaching experience, and had never anticipated being so intrigued by students’ journal entries; by the time the end of my internship came, I was also interested in teaching as a method of research.
These research interests have stayed with me throughout my student career, and have influenced me to continue my research at NEC, under the auspices of the Research Center for Learning Through Music and the Music-In-Education National Consortium. At NEC, the most viable way for me to look at the documentation of engaged learning was to review student portfolios from Solfege and Music-In-Education classes that I assist. Teachers at the Conservatory use these portfolios as another method of assessing student learning. My research, however, has led me to focus on how the same student portfolios can also act as teacher preparation tools for students who are interested in teaching; a topic completely relevant to my own life.
The overall diversity of my teaching and learning experiences has helped in shaping my outlook on what it means to be a responsible, engaging educator. As a result, I felt that the Arts-in-Education (Master’s) program at HGSE would be a good match for me because its flexible curriculum allowed me the opportunity to immerse myself in a similarly diverse learning environment, all while supplementing the conservatory education I have already had with classes focused specifically on arts-in-education. While at HGSE, I found my interests particularly lay in the work of Jessica Davis, because of her dynamic perspectives on children as artists, and her views of schools that use the arts for passion and industry; Steve Seidel, whose current research with Harvard Project Zero and The Evidence Project serves as a great model for my own research on portfolios and their usefulness for teacher preparation; and the work of Howard Gardner, whose theory of multiple intelligences can/does contribute to engaged learning through the arts; that is, examining the extent to which one can integrate it with the Learning Through Music and Artist-Teacher-Scholar models that I am already familiar with.
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