This week I found that the reading really demonstrated the importance of music in our lives. Music is more accessible than ever and we listen to it wherever we go. The reading states the importance of music to teenagers, who use it as a source of identity, use it to manipulate and reflect moods and emotions and use it as a coping mechanism. Despite this, music education is not experiencing the same popularity, as James highlighted in our lecture. During this lecture we were asked to defend music education and validate it as a significant part of the school curriculum, and while the importance of music is clear to us as music students, we were able to understand that it might seem irrelevant to people focused on achieving results through standardised testing on STEM subjects. However, I think that music education is only further validated by the importance of music in society today, however the ways it is being presented in classrooms might not be suitable or engaging for students.
Hallam, S. (2015). The Power of Music. Great Britain: International Music Education Research Centre This lecture gave me the opportunity to reflect upon myself as a music teacher and how my own beliefs about music education have changed as a result of what I’ve learned throughout this semester through this unit, the readings provided and my own research. The reading this week and my experiences over the semester have indicated the importance of learning by doing. In the case of Orff music, children are encouraged to learn music by making music, while Rowley highlights the importance of real world experiences in educating tertiary music students and assisting them in the transition between student and professional. Furthermore, she emphasises the importance of ePortifolios and their role in assisting students to reflect on their learning and develop critical thinking skills. I think this has emphasised the importance of this ePortfolio in my own learning as I think it will help me not only track my progress and growth as a music educator, but allow me to reflect more thoroughly on what I am learning throughout my degree.
Rowley, J (2019). The musician as teacher: Early career experiences of music teaching and leadership explored through an ePortfolio learning space. Leadership of Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Music Education. DOI: 9780367077334 Skills every music teacher needs - primary and high school | insidethismusicbox. (2019, Jan 11) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpxyvRVvbvc&feature=share I observed that the teaching styles between Balinese Gamelan and Orff Schulwerk had many similarities, in particular their use of melodic chunking, ostinati, repetition and learning all parts. We learned the decorative line initially (the hardest line) which we learned through observing, chunking and repeating. Though the process of learning was the same, I thought it was interesting that we started with the hardest harmonic line, while Orff usually teaches the melodic line first and builds on it with harmonic lines. We learned the remaining three lines continuing to move from hardest to easiest, and continuing with the pattern of repetition and echoing. It was interesting to see that aspects of Orff Teaching are applicable not only in school teaching but in music across different cultures as well.
This week we revisited the key elements of Orff Schulwerk as we learned a 12-16th century court dance called a Clog Bronie. Belinda taught us the dance initially through having us imitate hand actions. She nodded her head to indicate a beat as she taught these actions, which allowed us to better understand the timing of them, and then more easily transfer the hand actions to our feet, which became the foundation of the dance once we added the music. Through this process we also revised the use of repetition and chunking, and incorporated compositional activities by creating our own dances in smaller groups. Furthermore, we used the dance to highlight and understand the structure of the piece, similarly to the activity we did with The First Circle last week, which further affirmed in my mind the ability for Orff teaching to help students understand more complex musical concepts.
This week I came to realise that the Orff approach is not only useful for teaching specific songs with their accompanying body percussion and movement, but can be really useful in helping students understand more complicated concepts, like structure, and helping them learn music written with complex rhythms and metres. The lecture was based around The First Circle (3:05-4:44) by Rarum, a Jazz Fusion piece containing numerous changes in metre. After teaching the different sections of the piece using the words ‘Pineapple’ and ‘Butter’ to simplify the learning of additive metres and then transferring this into body percussion we were made to listen to a recording of the piece, and had to figure out the structure of the piece by identifying the sections we had learned. To me this highlighted the ability for Orff teaching to convey complex concepts, but also its significance in allowing inexperienced musicians to perform difficult music, by teaching pieces aurally through repetition, rather than relying on written notation, which can be difficult for inexperienced musicians to read and understand.
We continued to learn about varying ways to teach a song to students, particularly using methods that don’t require too much speaking. So far the use of repetition has really stood out to me as being important in the initial stages of learning the songs, especially repetition with focus on different elements (pitch, with words, rhythm/body percussion) which helps the students to memorise the song, and also internalise the pitch, words and rhythm as they work through the elements. While learning this way shows students how music is disciplined and repetitive, getting them to elaborate and improvise on the songs encourages creativity, which we continued to do through playing the room, and transferring what we had learned on to pitched and unpitched instruments.
Working with Orff specialist Belinda Smith this week affirmed what we learned about building a rapport with individual students, and how to do this in a group setting. We started by learning a simple song which allowed each student (going around the circle) to have a small ‘solo’ moment as they were required to sing their own name in response to the song. Furthermore, we learned the importance of letting students make their own music, not only by playing, but by composing and improvising. To facilitate this we learned to ‘play the room’, by using non-musical items like chairs, shoes, walls and boards as instruments which we used to create rhythmic ostinati.
The positive impacts of short term music tuition on the fine motor skills of children in this weeks reading demonstrates the significance of music education to children and its ability to improve skills in multiple areas of their life, indicating that a more extensive music education could continue and further develop these benefits for children.
I think that music education and tuition is also beneficial to students through its focus on the individual, as I’ve learned that it requires students to build a rapport with their students, and understand them as individuals in order to use the most appropriate teaching methods. This is further emphasised in Pam Burnard’s Teaching Music Creatively (2017), which also highlights the importance of ‘real world practice’, in the form of experiential learning, performance opportunity and formalised learning. Both these readings emphasised the importance of knowing and understanding individual students and their needs, and catering to them by using teaching methods that are appropriate and tailored to each student (otherwise called differentiation). Burnard, P. (2017). Teaching music creatively. [Book chapter]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.13166 Martins, M., Neves, L., Rodrigues, P., Vasconcelos, O., & Castro, S. (2018). Orff-Based Music Training Enhances Children’s Manual Dexterity and Bimanual Coordination. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02616\ The Richard Gill video was a good introduction to Orff Schulwerk and a good opportunity to see it in action and see its impact on the children in the class in real time. It was interesting to see Richard using Orff techniques even when simply interacting with the class. This included using simple and very straight forward instructions (“Watch”. “Listen”. “Please sit”.) He also kept their attention by whispering, and by giving the students individual roles. I thought it was also interesting to see the reactions of the teachers afterwards. I really agreed with Richard’s statement, that the way to learn and understand music, is by making it, and composing it yourself, which I’ve learned is typical of Orff Schulwerk from the following articles and sources (http://www.ancos.org.au/pages/about-us/what-is-orff-schulwerk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmaq06mT6ts)
ANCOS. (2019). What is Orf Schulwerk. Retrieved from http://www.ancos.org.au/pages/about-us/what-is-orff-schulwerk Gill, Richard. (Richard James) (2000). The creative music classroom with Richard Gill. MLC School, [Burwood, NSW]. What is Orff Schulwerk? (2014, March 29) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmaq06mT6ts. I think James’ video highlighted the impact and significance of technology in music education, but also the broadness the term ‘music education’. Normally I would associate the term ‘music educator’ with a classroom music teacher, or a peripatetic music teacher, however it occurred to me while watching the video that James was educating his audience about music through the use of technology, and also by allowing them to learn by doing, and composing music themselves. Furthermore I realised that music education is not confined to learning about classical music, but expands to all genres and styles, including the digital music James was demonstrating, and that by exploring the music and culture of our students, we can make their music education more relevant and interesting to them. During the lecture we discussed Orff Schulwerk and its benefits in teaching music, especially with regards to primary students. I thought that the idea of teaching music aurally was a really suitable for younger musicians who might not yet be proficient in reading music. James also pointed out during the lecture that music education was valuable not only for the sake of learning music, but also because of how music impacts other areas of education, which I later learned was due to its assisting in the development of the prefrontal cortex, and also in improving mental health (as seen in this article https://ab.co/31a1htc). I’ve always believed that music education is an important part of the school curriculum, and this lecture not only affirm this belief but intensified it, and makes me think that a thorough and rewarding music education should be afforded to all children.
Collins, A. (2018). Music education helps improve children’s ability to learn. Retrieved from http://education.abc.net.au/newsandarticles/blog/-/b/2974240/music-education-helps-improve-children-s-ability-to-learn?fbclid=IwAR33gwM-WzPeD8bpLhr7FDwkF_cZv4PaKiqQPHvqv0DSyXmpbp1WI5M-TJc Humberstone James. (2016, May 2). The Science of Dubstep | James Humberstone | TEDxOxford [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8s8e8JdGCc |