This part of my research focuses more on why listening to music is an essential part of music education. It is my ultimate goal after all to use internet radio to aid in listening activities and promote better listening habits.
Colwell (1966) argues that just because students perform music, doesn't meant they understand it. Instead we must take a holistic approach to music education, ensuring that we provide the necessary activities that foster deep understanding of music.
This same idea same idea is echoed in an article by Margaret Barrett (1992) , "listening experiences which expose children to a variety of musical forms and styles; opportunities toparticipate in a range of musical experiences; and, perhaps most importantly, the oppor- tunity to experiment with the materials of music in order to discover their possibilities and limitations, provide children with a number of examples of how music may become meaningful to them, and a powerful part of their daily lives."
So the question then is how do we teach listening in a way that aids student understanding of music and ultimately their performance.
The first step is to give them the background information. We need to teach them musical terms and how to connect their listening to their emotions. In a book written by Nicholas Cook (1990), he states, "listeners perceive musical structures depending on their degree of training and understanding of historical and social contexts. Again, imagination is vital in this aspect of musical understanding." So in other words, we need to set our students up to succeed as listeners and treat it like we would any other skill such as writing or performing.
The next step is training. We need to train our students to be deep listeners. Patricia Campbell writes about the pedagogy of listening. The article outlines three stages: attentive listening, engaged listening, and enactive listening. The ultimate goal is to get students to the enactive listening in which they are listening to every nuance of the musical recording.
The final step is assessment. How do we know if students are listening and understanding what they are listening to? I was able to find rubrics to evaluate student listening. These were some great sample rubrics available in Cavner and Gould's article (2003).
Ultimately the goal is to improve student understanding and performance. When we think of higher levels of thinking this would be hitting to that highest level of creation or synthesis. Listening is the step below that, evaluation. This is a much more attainable step that all students in and out of a music classroom should be taught. "The most important thing that we can provide for the majority of children is to teach them how to listen intelligently, and with a growing sense of the power of music to symbolize our emotional sensibilities. Focusing so much on performance in music education, at the expense of developing sophisticated methods of teaching students to listen with intelligent involvement, fails to address the demands of the majority of students, with the result that most young people leave school with no idea at all of how to listen to music, or what to listen for." (Walker, 2005).
Through this research I learned more about the need to teach listening to students. I also picked up a few strategies and terms to help me in that process. I feel revitalized in my goal of incorporating internet radio and finding ways of broadening my music curriculum.
On a side note: I also am getting more comfortable searching for articles via the MSU library. My initial research focused mostly on google searches and google scholar searches. A few things came from so blog links as well. This post primarily came from the MSU e-sources. It's a very handy resource indeed.
References:
Barrett, M. (1992). Music Education and the Natural Learning Model. International Journal of Music Education, 27-34.
Campbell, P. (2005). Deep Listening to the Musical World. Music Educators Journal, 92 (1), 30-36.
Cavner, D., & Gould, E. (2003) Whole Language and Music-Listening Instruction: Part 2 of 2. Music Educators Journal, 89 (5), 19-25.
Colwell, R. (1966, Jan). Music: Both a Performing Art and a Listening Art. Music Educators Journal, 52 (4), 45-50.
Cook, N. (1990). Music, Imagination, and Culture. Clarendon Press.
Walker, R. (2005). A worthy function for music in education. International Journal of Music Education, 23 (2), 135-138.
Great research. I might be interesting to include a pre and post assessment to measure changes in listening skills.
ReplyDeleteYour research seems to support not just teaching performance skills, but also "music appreciation".
Teaching "listening" to students in order to help them grow in their appreciation of music is a very worthy goal. And, as you said, that will ultimately improve student understanding and performance. I haven't used MSU Library resources very much, so thanks for sharing and reminding me that it is a good source of information!
ReplyDeleteThat's a good idea Katie. The only difficult part is finding a way to measure these listening skills in a formalized manner. In the performing classroom we can see their listening abilities through observation... measuring growth is an interesting idea that I never considered. Thanks!
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