Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Southwest Chapter.

As music history teaching increasingly moves among in-person, online, and hybrid formats, instructors must consider what students should do before, during, and after class. From synchronous online classrooms to large in-person lecture sessions, four musicologists at Texas public institutions describe how they teach music history and why they teach it that way. Modality and student body are rarely things an instructor selects, and each configuration makes some kinds of teaching possible that others do not. This in-person panel at the University of North Texas, being livestreamed to the AMS Annual Meeting, offers four accounts of teaching designed for particular circumstances.

Sarah Lucas shares her experiences teaching popular music history courses in Texas A&M University-Kingsville's Javelina Jumpstart summer program. She discusses strategies for engaging non-music majors taking their first university class in an online synchronous classroom, as well as the benefits and challenges of participating in such an initiative.

Drawing on his experience teaching large non-music-major undergraduate music history courses at the University of North Texas (UNT), Brian Anderson discusses designing effective activities for UNT's flipped and hybrid initiative, instructional modality decisions, and how generative AI is reshaping learning objectives, assessment design, and student engagement.

Barbara Dietlinger discusses the flipped classroom in in-person undergraduate music history courses for music majors. Assigning lecture material before class reserves meetings for small-group work such as source and score analysis. She focuses on offline handwritten group assignments as a way of slowing and personalizing interpretation and encouraging negotiation among group members.

Kimberly Beck Hieb teaches at West Texas A&M University, where the student body is largely rural and where students arrive with diverse and often strongly held convictions. She asks what changes when a music history course is built for a particular student population rather than a generic one, and considers how the classroom can accommodate disagreement without flattening it.

These four brief presentations will lead into moderated discussion with the audience. Every teaching situation permits something the others do not, and we expect the audience to recognize possibilities in our circumstances that we have overlooked in our own.