Student Engagement: Texts and Tools
Chair(s): Sarah Waltz (University of the Pacific)
Organized by the AMS Pedagogy Study Group
This session will be comprised of two parts. The first hour will feature an interactive panel discussion on “Music History Texts in the Modern College Classroom,” in which four music history textbook authors will discuss their work. In the second hour, we will hear two papers on “Tools for Active Learning,” discussing approaches to multimedia, hands-on learning in the music history classroom, and beyond.
Presentations of the Symposium
Music History Texts in the Modern College Classroom
J. Peter Burkholder1, Danielle Fosler-Lussier2, Sara Haefeli3, Esther M. Morgan-Ellis4, Kristy Swift5
1Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, 2Ohio State University, 3Ithaca College, 4University of North Georgia, 5University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music
In this sixty–minute interactive panel discussion, authors of recent and forthcoming texts that engage student learning in music history will explain how their books:
- address the needs of different populations of learners;
- critique content, methodologies, and narrative language;
- employ historiographical processes;
- explore how written texts inform, reflect, and respond to pedagogy and performance;
- make materials accessible;
- narrate people and topics that engage with relevant current transdisciplinary socio-cultural issues concerning ethnicity, gender, labor, race, sexuality, socioeconomics, and social justice;
- put musicians, musics, and musickings in dialogue with the canon;
- reflect collaboration with colleagues, editors, publishers, reviewers, and students;
- support diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Collectively, panelists will propose how written texts are relevant in a post-pandemic world in which compounding levels of information across mediums and platforms are available within seconds. They will explain how their volumes can be used to learn about musicians, musics, and musickings through written language. Employing self-reflection, they will disclose the specific criteria they used to choose from myriad possible subjects. Then, they will address the challenges of narrating music as social practice by acknowledging the ways that their volumes mediate and represent cultural, disciplinary, individual, and their own personal values. Positing ways that students may be empowered by learning about the complexities of telling stories about music through language, panelists will conclude by demonstrating how texts may be used to teach students how to make choices, employ language for storytelling, receive feedback, and solve problems in creative ways.
Individually, each panel member will introduce topics for discussing the place of music texts in the modern classroom. Participants and panelists will dialogue about the benefits and limitations of texts within our information-rich and hyperlinked culture. The discussion will explore the past role of textbooks and the future role that newer texts might have in modern music classes, especially as the discipline of ethno/musicology continues to undergo radical change.
Tools for Active Learning
Janice Dickensheets1, Hayoung Heidi Lee2
1University of Northern Colorado, 2West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Dickensheets, “Gamifying the Art of Listening”
Games have been used as teaching tools for thousands of years. Pedagogical use of computer-based games dates to the 1970s. Yet many still hesitate to implement gaming in university-level academic music courses, perhaps out of a mis-guided belief that they will be perceived as less rigorous and, therefore, less respected. As a music history professor, I fell prey to this fear, and it took an online COVID year and a self-conducted equity audit for me to explore gaming as part of my pedagogical toolbox. My journey, thus far, has led me to create three escape-room style games designed to provide listening practice for my freshman music history prequel course. In this presentation I will discuss the problems that motivated me to introduce gaming into this class, offer a summary of its initial debut, and provide a demonstration of my three games.
Lee, “Women on Record: Music Vanguards of Pennsylvania”
Women on Record: Music Vanguards of Pennsylvania was a public exhibit resulting from a collaborative project completed in February 2023 with students and faculty in music, art and design at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. From the initial conception to the final installation of the exhibit, students participated in the research process, writing and editing, design and fabrication, and curation of performances. The initial idea for the exhibit grew out of an existing course, “Women in Music,” which fulfills the university’s general education requirement. Instead of a typical term paper, the students in the course were tasked to develop exhibition content, focusing on Pennsylvanian women musicians. The exhibit enabled students to gain the same skills and perspectives as any impactful class assignment; however, the students’ awareness of their responsibilities as writers, researchers and designers for a public space engaged them to be more innovative and critical. At the same time, the exhibit brought them to celebrate collaboration and learning. Finally, the topic of local history, focusing on women musicians, paved a new path in the university’s general education course towards a more diverse and inclusive curriculum.
