Final assessment. The Place of Music in 21st Century Education. COURSERA.
XXI century technology may provide us, teachers with marvelous tools to make our lessons interesting, engaging and creative. Nevertheless, I think that neither using the most modern technological devices and artifacts or teaching with the newest, most groundbreaking theories is absolutely necessary to provide high quality music education to our students.
For most of us who became professional musicians before the current decade, it was not technology the main ingredient which played a significant role in our education. It was the passion, the dedication, the knowledge of our own teachers, their commitment to transmit their knowledge and encourage our creative skills. And these remain the elements I consider the most important in my own teaching.
The use of technology is also limited by where we are in the world, so we must always consider the economic conditions and the access to technology that our students, their schools, communities and ourselves as teachers have at our disposal. Places like the Australian school presented in the first week of the course, equipped with top-notch musical instruments, recording studios and software designed specifically for that school, or the Steiner schools that require constant and very specific teaching training, seem rather unrealistic options for those of us who are teachers in poorer, developing countries (in my case, Ecuador in South America). So I remain convinced that our efforts as educators should remain focused on the quality of our teaching and the ways on how we can provide inspiration and develop the creative skills of our students with the tools we have at hand.
That being said, I am very favourable towards the use of technology in the classroom and I have been implementing it in my lessons for a long time. As a classical guitar teacher, which is of course a very traditional music subject, I need to find creative ways in my use of technological tools. The ones I mostly use are audio and video recordings and YouTube recordings. There are several ways how I do it. The first is that I encourage my students to create their own “practice YouTube channels” where they can upload the weekly progress of the pieces they are studying. Another way how I use technology is that a couple days after each lesson, I send a brief 2-4 minute video to my students where I make a summary of the lesson or a short explanation of a new technique or a difficult passage. Also, I have created a YouTube channel where I play the pieces that my students are learning in their lessons, so they can hear and access them at any time, and thus remain motivated and inspired in between lessons. The videos are organised by grade (or level), and every grade is stored in a different playlist and uses a different colour, so the channel is easy to navigate even for my younger students.
My favourite outtake from this course was the video Counterpoint from Week 2, where the eminent Australian composer and music educator Richard Gill shared his ideas. There, he described singing as the best and cheapest way to introduce children to music and familiarise them with every musical concept, such as composing, improvising, reading and writing music. He also emphasised that we as educators should teach kids through what they already know and developing it, instead of imposing what we think is good music. He also stated the importance of not getting stuck with one style of music, but providing our students with a great variety of pieces: from classical music, to pop, to folk songs, to world music. These ideas are closely related to the ones exposed by Adam Maggs, from the Week 2 video Liveschool where he stressed the importance of engaging students immediately in the music they are most interested in at the moment, with the songs they have just discovered and are excited about.
One way I could incorporate these ideas in my own teaching is that I could ask my students in a classroom to write down what their favourite song(s) are, with a brief description of what makes them feel so close to those particular songs. Then, I would use those songs to teach particular elements of music, like harmony, melodic phrasing, groove, rhythm, percussive patterns, scales, differences between major & minor tonalities, instrumental techniques, etc. In this manner, I could teach music through the songs that the kids are really fond of, and there would assure a very diverse selection of music in any classroom.
YouTube and Coursera are also fantastic tools for self education, and for the advancement of our teaching and musical skills. So the other way I plan to continue using technology for my development as a music teacher is to watch YouTube masterclasses about the teaching and practice of music, write down all the information I find valuable and applicable for my students and incorporate this new knowledge right away in my guitar lessons.
In conclusion, I believe that the tools that are available to us in the XXI century such as tradition, innovation and technology, all have interesting, useful and applicable ideas that can be creatively combined by us, music educators, to produce great results in the classroom. It’s our responsibility as teachers to find the best ways to keep alive the flame of art and music in our students and to inspire them to be always curious, always passionate despite the amount of technology we use in our classroom.
Diego Galárraga Sugoniaev 