El Sistema Fellow Teacher Training course

  An example of what we need more of!:

 

Master of Arts in Teaching Music

a partnership of JAMM, the Juneau Symphony and University of Alaska Southeast

                                   

OVERVIEW: 

In partnership with Juneau Alaska Music Matters (JAMM) and the Juneau Symphony (JS), the University of Alaska Southeast proudly announces its one-year Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Music K-12 certification program to reflect the changing role of today’s music teacher.  As part of the course requirements, MAT students will conduct their teaching internships at JAMM school sites and music classrooms within the Juneau School District, as well as perform in the Juneau Symphony. This  program gives preference to musicians interested in using music for social change. 

Through a competitive application process, up to four $10,000 scholarship are available to music majors/minors whose main instrument is violin, viola, cello, or bass.  MAT graduates are awarded a Master’s degree in Education with an Alaskan teaching certificate in K-12 Music.  Program begins July 26, 2015

Application: http://www.uas.alaska.edu/education/programs/mat-secondary.html

Application Deadline:  April 1, 2015 (letter of intent for consideration of scholarship is March 1, 2015)

Living in Juneau, Alaska:  Located in Juneau, Alaska, this artistic community is surrounded by natural beauty and provides an idyllic environment to pursue a graduate degree focused on community engagement, positive youth development, and social change through the arts.  Accessible only by boat or plane, Alaska’s capital supports a symphony, two opera companies, several theatre companies, and a host of other arts opportunities throughout the community.  In 2013, Juneau was selected by the John F. Kennedy Center as the 11th city in the country for its Any Given Child program, an initiative committed to bringing equity and access to arts education for children in grades K-8.  

Interning at Juneau Alaska Music Matters (JAMM): All MAT students will conduct their 9-month internship with JAMM, an El Sistema-inspired program, which uses the power of music and ensemble to help children reach their fullest potential.  JAMM serves 500 students in three elementary schools in the Juneau School District.  Lorrie Heagy will serve as the mentor teacher.  She is the 2011 Alaska Teacher of the Year, school music teacher, and one of fifty Sistema Fellows who studied at the New England Conservatory and in Venezuela to bring Sistema’s transformative approach to the United States.  In addition to general music classes and after-school JAMM programming, MAT students also will gain experiences in classes at the the middle and high school level. 

Quartet-in-Residence: JAMM and the Juneau Symphony, along with other key community stakeholders, will sponsor a Quartet-in-Residence by providing a $10,000 scholarship to four music majors/minors who play a stringed instrument:  violin, viola, cello, or bass.  The quartet will inspire JAMM students, as well as contribute to Juneau’s classical music community and teaching artist pool, while increasing teachers credentialed to work in the K-12 music classroom. 

Aligning the MAT Music (K-12) Certification with the Transformative Role of Today’s Music Teacher:

The role of the music teacher has changed. Music teachers are agents of change, where instrumental music serves as a critical opportunity for all children to have access to the social, emotional, and intellectual benefits that music provides.  The MAT Certification in K-12 Music provides its students coursework that prepares them for their multi-faceted role in today’s society:  as citizen, artist, teachers, and scholar. 

COMPONENTS OF THE MAT MUSIC (K-12) DEGREE PROGRAM:

Brain-based Teaching Practices:    

Students will participate in Juneau’s Basic Arts Institute, where participants learn skills that will enable them to apply brain research into their classroom practice and learn first-hand knowledge of how the arts increase student engagement and achievement.  Participants will work with experts, local artists and cultural leaders to explore a variety of arts activities that they can use to integrate the performing, visual, cultural, and media arts into their curriculum.

Rehearsing and Performing with the Juneau Symphony: 

This course mutually benefits the Quartet-in-Residence, as well as the Juneau Symphony. By rehearsing and performing with the Juneau Symphony for its concert series, MAT students maintain their performance skills, while by actively engaging and contributing to Juneau’s musical community 

Emphasis on Positive Youth Development:

Students will apply Lerner’s Positive Youth Development model, as well as other educational theories that emphasize student empowerment, self-determination, efficacy, and resiliency.  Educational theorists such as Freire, Dewey, Bandura, and Dweck provide different lenses in which to understand and support a child’s cognitive, social, and emotional growth. 

Overview of Music Pedagogies and Music Technology Applications: 

Students will actively participate in and teach lessons demonstrating key principles from Dalcroze, Orff, Kodaly, Suzuki, Feierabend, and World Music Drumming.  The lessons also include brain-based teaching strategies that help motivate, engage, and empower students.  Other components of this technology course include GarageBand to create music, Finale to make simplified arrangements, and Web 2.0 tools to document learning as part of a professional educational portfolio. 

Classroom Management:

Although well-structured, developmentally appropriate, and engaging lessons often preclude behavioral issues, today’s music teacher faces challenges different from those of the regular classroom teacher.  Oftentimes, music teachers are tasked with teaching ensembles of fifty students or more (each with and instrument in hand) and  no other adult support.  Place this situation in an after-school context and classroom management can become even more challenging.  To equip MAT students with a more comprehensive tool kit, the internship provides students with an overview of effective classroom approaches, including the Responsive Classroom, Love and Logic, and Michael Grinder’s ENVoY.

Educational Research:   

The MAT K-12 Music Certification program embodies the scholar-practitioner model, which helps students apply new knowledge through action and civic engagement. As part of this research class, students will create and apply new knowledge to effect social change in their school and community.  Grant writing has become a necessity and required skill of today’s music teacher. Students will work alongside JAMM music teachers to identify a research project that will contribute meaningful data toward student outcomes, program effectiveness, or community engagement.  MAT students will incorporate this data into a grant application that they’ve identified and written to help support JAMM.    

Electronic Portfolio:

Throughout the MAT K-12 Music Certification program, students will document their work as citizens, artists, teachers, and scholars. By including rich media as part of their portfolios, UAS students not only will be contributing to the wider community, but also providing future employers evidence of their work. 

For more information contact: 

Scott Christian srchristian@uas.alaska.edu  (907) 796-6563

Lorrie Heagy heagyl@gmail.com      

 

Stagnation leading to Toxification

Negativity and humiliation = excellence in music education?

The above link is to an article showing the most extreme side of music education. It warns us again what can be produced by the toxic music education culture prevalent in many schools and higher education, and which extends into professional music culture.We have all experienced this to some degree.

Music education has avoided the rigorous assessment and evaluation processes that has reformed and developed education in other disciplines, mostly because it still predominantly exists in the domain of private education. It's quite staggering to think how little music education has developed - having church choirs operating the same way they did in the Middle Ages is not necessarily a good thing.

The music education world, and the classical music world in particular, needs to do away with the following:

• Perpetuation of the 'Talent' myth
• Idolization of prodigies and maestros
• Idolization of 'dead, white blokes' and the fixed concept of a 'one true way' to perform their music
• Elitism and maintaining music education in a silo separate from other disciplines
• Unhealthy focus on technique to the detriment of fostering musicality
• A total lack of interest in considering audiences
• A hierarchy of 'most talented' musicians from conductor, soloist down to teacher - Those who are not a professional soloist have not 'made it' and have made to feel that they have failed
• The dismissal of the potential of music as an integral part of how a community functions and how we serve each other

You can read lots of similar thoughts in Music, Talent and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System.

Although admittedly El Sistema in Venezuela does not avoid all of the above, it is so refreshing how it demands us to ask questions of our music education contexts. Many El Sistema-inspired programs are approaching things in a very different way - but we must be careful not to replace some of the above with Venezuelan celebrities. The more music education programs become accessible to the wider community, the more accountable and progressive they will have to be. Teaching and learning methods will have to be based on solid academic research and brain science rather than the possession of a performance diploma or degree. Teachers will have to be engaged in reflective practice rather than replicating from experience at a conservatory. Much of this is starting to happen and we need more!

One month at the Pastoral Women's Council

My first month as co-programme manager at the Pastoral Women's Council has been hectic to say the least. Whilst the projects themselves operate in Loliondo, Longido and Monduli (North Masaailand in general), I have been working at the Arusha office. Here I spend my time with my co-manager, two finance assistants and the executive director when she is not in the field.

I've been plunged into the season of reporting and fundraising - luckily the reports are almost over, and we've had renewed committments from donors to sponsor masaai girls at secondary school and higher education. Also the beginning of the year has seen the renewal of staff contracts and other HR fun and games. Right now, the rest of the management team are getting ready for the annual staff meeting, General Assembly and the first board meeting of the year, which will be in Loliondo. Phew!

Learning about the organisation and all the projects they run has obviously been a necessity, along with how best to communicate with staff across three districts. I still have so much to learn but these have been the most important things so far:

• Girls sponsorship at secondary school is the most effective way of preventing forced early marriages and pregnancies.
• I did not previously know about the tradition of 'esoto' - night time dances with Masaai warriors and girls that ends up in unwanted pregnancies.
• Its a dilemma to encourage girls (and boys) to finish their education when the schools are of such low quality; corporal punishment is rife, teachers are ill-trained and often don't bother showing up to lessons, and the curriculum is pre-Victorian.
•  Land rights cases can be postponed for over six months at a time and subsequently can continue for years.
• There is a bewildering array of various mechanisms of local government, some of which are taking on the responsibilities of their community e.g. sponsoring girls' education, and funding the process of women receiving land titles.
• Nursery schools that don't receive any funding from the government are trying to sustain themselves through livestock businesses.

On to month no. 2...

 

The Middle Ground

I have just finished reading the inspiring story of missionary pilot Nate Saint in the book ‘Jungle Pilot’. One of the first MAF pilots in the 1940s and 50s, Saint was a pioneer in the true sense of the word; he built airstrips, flew into areas never accessed by plane before, designed bucket drops to deliver parcels without landing, vastly improved the safety of small aircraft that has a continued legacy in missionary aircraft, and built houses, a hangar, mission hospital and school. His most famous legacy was being part of the team of missionaries who established contact with the notoriously violent Waodani people; all five men were martyred in the process.

Many have been inspired by stories of pioneers in whatever field of mission and development they are working in, but the next generations require different approaches in their more developed and urban contexts. Nate's son Stephen writes an epilogue in our edition where he talks about the challenges of establishing services run by and for the Waodani people, who Nate was contacting when he died.

I have been thinking about putting approaches to development into four categories; Emergency relief, short, medium and long term. Many development organisations, and the wider public, are familiar with the approaches required for the first two; we raise money for disaster relief, and ship out huge amounts of second-hand resources, we build schools, hospitals and dig wells. This has been going on for over a hundred years.

Medium term approaches have been more recent; sponsoring children to go to school, micro-enterprise and micro-credit. In the West, we are getting more used to buying products from these enterprises and even funding small loans for business start-ups (www.kiva.com). I have found that there is not much of a continuum from the short term still; training the teachers and management at the schools and hospitals that have been built, and facilitating the maintenance of wells in rural villages. Likewise, many of these small businesses or NGOs that offer training in a variety of skills and crafts are still run by expats, the products are designed according to western styles, and their markets abroad and access is facilitated by volunteers. Without adressing these issues, the short term solution has had little impact.

How do we as development organisations continue to make an impact in this middle ground? By building on existing infrastructure, by adding to and working within the infrastructure, by training those who are running social services and advocating for their contributions to providing those services outside of urban areas. This is the medium term approach with the aim of reaching long term goals of independence, sustainability, accountability and ownership.

In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Pastoral Women’s Council has been working with the Pastoral and the District Councils to advocate for support for pastoralist girls’ education. As a result, these institutions are taking on education as a priority in their strategies, are sponsoring girls to go to school and are establishing a Pre Form 1 centre to support the transition from primary to secondary school. These projects are starting to change community attitudes towards education for girls, and making long lasting changes within the existing infrastructure. Much more needs to be done, and I feel there should be more dialogue around successful partnerships with government institutions and how we can best support them.

Many organisations also do not have an exit strategy. If there is no thinking behind making your operations defunct and unnecessary, there is no commitment to making long term changes. Instead we create further reliance on the support we deliver. It’s very hard to imagine yourself or an organisation being useless, and too many NGOs thrive on the notion of being needed, and in fact use that as a ‘selling point’ for support. We need to more accurately map out the landscape of the middle ground to consider a future where services are locally provided and sustained.