Taking
into account all of my students in both private and public settings, most of
them are between the ages of eight and thirteen – born directly into what
scholars are currently referring to as, “The Information Age.” As far as most
of them are concerned, the internet has always been there, no different from
the sun and the moon, a household utility that is no more foreign than turning
on a faucet or opening a refrigerator. I remember life without the internet or
cell phones. I remember going to school without those things, where in music
class, the best we could do in an elementary setting was sing around the music
teacher’s piano and participate in the occasional school play. If we wanted to
learn an instrument, we needed to take private lessons at home – there was
nothing for us at the school due to a lack of resources… and of course, a lack
of technology.
It
is hard to imagine a lack of technology in the classroom today, yet my “prehistoric”
elementary education still exists, to a degree, in many classrooms across the
country. Technology is certainly a game-changer, distinguishing the quality of
education from school to school. You can argue that the genesis of its merger
with public music education was Bob Moog’s development of the Mini-Moog
synthesizer in 1970 – a portable music-making machine with a built-in piano
keyboard. This portable device could only sound one key at a time, but its mass
manufacturing opened the door for more and more companies to produce their own
built-in keyboard models. Note velocity was implemented in 1975, and a few
short years later, 5-voice polyphony. These keyboards became more and more like
a miniature piano, and more accessible for a younger generation.
Today, an ideal
general music classroom in a public setting would allow an electronic midi
keyboard for each student to work on. “Technology allows us to teach students
with very little musical background by having them create music and compose
music,” says Barbara Freedman, the music director at Greenwich High School in
Greenwich, CT. “It allows us to take them through the process of understanding
music and what goes into creating music – like harmony, melody, and rhythm. It’s
applied learning. They apply themselves to the practice by actually composing.”
Indeed, in today’s world, we must start to abandon the aesthetic approach
championed by Bennett Reimer and move closer towards David Elliott’s praxial
philosophy, which states that the process of learning music must involve
hands-on experience. We need not only for students to read about music, but
actually, physically, do what musicians do – practice and perform. Implementing
technology, such as having a keyboard for each student, allows us as educators
to better realize this mission.
But technology in
the eyes of the students means something much different than keyboards, or for
that matter, discovering a more potent educational method. Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest… what is it about these mediums that
appeal to us? What is the one common thread that they all have in common?
They allow us to
share.
We share pictures
and videos. We share our feelings, and our fears, and our opinions. And on all
of these websites, we have the ability to share music. It seems all too simple
now: we’re teaching a unit on Indonesian gamelan, of course our students need
to hear how this sounds! And so we type it into Google, click on one of
hundreds of video links, pick the highest quality sample, and play it loudly
for the class, and all of that just took less than 11 seconds. This was not
possible a few measly decades ago, and what an advantage this is for us today!
A world of information, a few keystrokes away… so why do we still have music
educators in this very country – in this very state! – that resent this technology?
I understand old-school methods, and I understand the phrase, “If it ain’t
broke, don’t fix it!” But 40 years ago, if music educators were given the
opportunity to make anything they want happen in a classroom happen, with
little to no effort, wouldn’t they jump onto that opportunity? In other words, if the technology existed at the time, they
would have used it. There’s just no way they wouldn’t – it would be a clear
disservice to deny students an obvious advantage to learning the subject.
Music
educators today must be on board with technology. We must embrace it fully, and
we must embrace the aspect that pulls our students in in the first place – the ability
to share music. Have students write and share their compositions. Have students
share music relevant to that day’s lesson. Have students write about the music
they hear on blogs, and share their posts with their class to get feedback.
Have students record their auditions, and concerts, and recitals on video and
post them so that we may all see, hear, and offer our own contributions in
order to build progress within ourselves. I could go on. There’s such a
plethora of opportunity to take advantage of, and a few short decades from now,
those opportunities could double, triple, quadruple even. Technology may grow
exponentially, and so we must always adapt and utilize whatever is available to
us, so that our future generations of students may truly receive the best
education they could possible receive.
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