Professional musician and educator Randy Wong has long been a proponent of interdisciplinary, project-based forms of teaching and learning in education. Originally from Kailua, Hawaii, his interests in studying assessment methods for learning through the arts stem from positive personal experiences he had as a youth at Hanahauoli School (Honolulu, Hawaii), and via the inspiration of his mother Terrina Wong, who herself is an arts educator.
Randy attended New England Conservatory as a classical double bass performance major, during which he became deeply involved with NEC’s Music-In-Education program and Research Center for Learning Through Music, and where he served as research assistant to Larry Scripp, spearheading projects on portfolios and digital portfolio assessment.
Randy’s Music-In-Education Guided Internship at the Boston Arts Academy provided him the opportunity to create and teach his own Solfege curriculum, perform as an Artist-In-Residence at BAA with his solfege quintet The Solfege Five, and speak on his experience as a guided intern to the first MIENC conference held at Northwestern University (Chicago, IL). As documentation of his work in the MIE Concentration, he proposed the notion of an electronic/digital portfolio system for use by fellow MIE students. His final project for the MIE Concentration was the development of a set of rubrics that would be used to score MIE studentsí portfolios against the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. This became the basis for the MIENC RubricCubes system and the MIE Digital Portfolio System, which has been further developed by the MIERC and MIENC, and is in use today by MIE@NEC students. Randy’s experiences in the MIE Concentration program led him to pursue further study and research of alternative assessment strategies and of practices in interdisciplinary/arts-integrated education; his graduate studies at Harvard University earned him a Ed.M in Arts In Education and valuable study with Harvard Project Zero researchers Steve Seidel, Jessica Hoffmann Davis, Stone Wiske, and Howard Gardner. Randy currently works for the Music-In-Education National Consortium as a program administrator and information architect. He is also an active performer: Randy’s group WAITIKI released its first album in September, 2005 and has been invited by the Mexican government to perform a tribute to composer Juan Garcia Esquivel at Mexico City’s Teatro de la Ciudad. Still an entrepreneur, Randy is co-founder of the record label PASS OUT RECORDS and has also commercially-released albums on that label. He is also a substitute player for the Honolulu Symphony.
Randy is a 2003 Honors Graduate of New England Conservatory, where he earned a Bachelors of Music in Classical Double Bass performance, and a Concentration in Music-In-Education. He also holds an Ed.M in Arts In Education from Harvard University, and further studied double bass at Carnegie Mellon University.
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