Melissa Forbes

Australian and international music courses - document contains entries from numerous other music programs both domestic and international, with comments from Tamara on whether the program/course appears to be an integration of theory/aural/practice/composition.

Dimensions of education design

1. participation and reification - how much to reify learning, its subject and its object
2. the designed and the emergent - the relation between teaching and learning is not one of simple cause and effect
3. the local and the global - educational experiences must connect to other experiences
4. identification and negotiability - there are multiple perspectives on what an educational design is about: its effect on learning depends on inviting identities of participation (p. 265)

Reification

To the extent that knowledge is reified, decontextualized, or proceduralized, learning can lead to a literal dependence on the reification of the subject matter, and thus...to a brittle kind of understanding with very narrow applicability. This is especially true if the delivery of codified knowledge takes place away from actual practice, with a focus on instructional structure and pedagogical authority that discourages negotiation. As a form of educational design, the reification of knowledge is thus not in itself a guarantee that relevant or applicable learning will take place. In fact, it can be misleading in that evaluation processes reflecting the structure of a reified curriculum are circular. Students with literal relation to a subject matter can reproduce reified knowledge without attempting to gain some ownership of its meaning. An evaluation process will become more information regarding the learning that has actually taken place to the extent that its structure does not parallel that of instruction too closely, but instead conforms to the structure of engagement in actual practice and the forms of competence inherent in it. (p. 265)

...educational design is not primarily about such reification, but more fundamentally about pondering when to reify and when to rely on participation. It is about balancing the production of reificative material with the design of forms of participation that provide entry into a practice and let the practice itself be its own curriculum... (p. 265)

In this balancing act, the primary focus must be on the negotiation of meaning rather than of the mechanics of information transmission and acquisition.

mechanics of learning are involved but need not take centre stage... (p. 265)

when meanings of learning are properly attended to, the mechanics take care of themselves. We learn to speak a language so successfully by immersion in part because we are focused on the experience of meaning rather than on the mechanics of learning. (p. 266)

1. To what degree should the subject matter be reified for educational purposes?
2. What forms of participation are required to give meaning to the subject matter?
3. How much should learning itself be reified as a process?
4. At what point is such reification more a distraction than a help?
5. What forms of participation can be designed that do not require reification of the subject matter beyond what is already part of the practice (p. 266)

Teaching and learning

Not inherently linked - both can take place exclusive of the other - to the extent that they are linked in practice, the linkage is not of cause and effect but of resources and negotiation (p. 266)

What matters is the interaction of the planned and the emergent - that is, the ability of teaching and learning to interact so as to become structuring resources for each other. (p. 267)

1. How can we honor the emergent character of learning?
2. How can we minimize teaching so as to maximize learning?
3. What kind of rhythm and shifts of focus will allow learning and teaching to inform each other?
4. How can we maximize the processes of negotiation of meaning enabled by interaction? (p. 267)

identities which are locally differentiated but broadly connected (p. 269)

Students need:

1. places of engagement
2. materials and experiences with which to build an image of the world and themselves
3. ways of having an effect on the world making their actions matter.

From this perspective the purpose of educational design is not to appropriate learning and institutionalize it into an engineered process, but to support the formation of learning communities... (p. 271)

Once learning communities are truly functional an connected to the world in meaningful ways, teaching events can be designed around them as resources to their practices and as opportunities to open up their learning more broadly. Again, there is a profound difference between viewing educational design as the source or cause of learning and viewing it as a resource to a learning community. (p. 271)

...it is more important for students to have experiences that allow them to take charge of their own learning than to cover a lot of material. A curriculum would then look more like an itinerary of transformative experiences of participation than a list of subject matter. Given enough resources, the practice of a learning community can become rich and complex enough to be the driving force of a complete education. (p. 272)

...it is more important for the informational content of an educational experience to be identity-transforming than to be “complete” in some abstract way. This is especially true in a world where it is clearly impossible to know all there is to know, but where identity involves choosing what to know and becoming a person for whom such knowledge in meaningful. (p. 273)

Will Richardson

Pam Moran

Mozilla Tedx talk

Yong Zhao

Rod's approach is the ask the same questions at the program and course level:

• what do we want the students to be able to do at the end (of the couse/program)?
• what are the learning outcomes?
• how do we assess those outcomes?

The focus has now shifted to getting certain course specs in order, focussing on these questions. We also talked about renaming these revised courses, to better reflect what students will actually be doing, and to help clarify for ourselves as teachers what we expect from the students. For example, in MUI1007, Bruce has not really taught it as a 'fundamnetals of music' course (driling students on content) but as a course in which you learn how to apply the language (fundamentals) of music.

Roles - facilitator - artist - responder

as a responder, you really want the artist to their best work not your best work - set competition to one side

The core steps:

1. statements of meaning - "what was stimulating, surprising, evocative, memorable, touching, meaningful for you?" - offer responders a palette of choices - meaning is at the heart of an artist's work - nothing is too small to notice
2. artist as questioner - needs a balance between the general and the specific
3. neutral questions from responders
4. permissioned opinions - "I have an opinion about X. Would you like to hear it?"

Facilitator then thanks both artists and responders. Then seek for either the artist or a responder to offer a summary of the discussion.

Had a meeting with Rhod this morning to update him on the ideas for MUI1000, 1004, 3000 and 3001. Rhod had some good advice in that he asked me to make sure that what was proposed would help support students in education to demonstrate competency in a teaching area and to look at the QSA music syllabus. Rhod also queried whether we were consideirng a top-down apporach to the design of these courses (and the Program) and I explained that this was exactly what Rod Sims had been helping me with, and that the ideas for these courses had come from a consideration of what we want students to be able to do by the end of the Program.

Another issue to consider was the production of course materials by LRD. Rhod suggested I go and speak to Deb Evans about what was being proposed which I did. I asked Deb to put a hold on MUI1000 production, but to proceed with MUI1004 for next semester as it was being offered externally as a teach out due to the introduction of MUI1007.

Rhod also suggested I speak to Phillip to make sure that he understood that these changes would mean the jettisoning of the course materials - have since spoken to Phillip and he understands that and accepts that that will be necessary in order to implement the new course design.

Next task is looking at course specs in time for SoCA Management Committee in April.

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks interview on Concept to classroom

Is the student building theories, is the student the one who has to put together ideas based upon evidence and information at hand?

A lot of people try to look at constructivism as a program, or a methodology, or as a series of techniques. But it's really a life view. It's really a philosophy, it's an epistemology, it's a way of looking at teaching and learning, it's a way of looking at how people construct understandings of our world.

Constructing knowledge talks about how we as the learners are reformulating, refiltering, relooking at constantly the way that we see our world, that the teacher can't give away explanations, the teacher can't give away knowledge, the student can't receive it passively from the teacher. The learning and teaching dynamic is a process of negotiation in which the people come to the table, try to make sense of the world, and in any one particular instance try to make sense of the concept at hand.

In a traditional setting, the teacher takes charge of a lot of the intellectual work in that classroom. The teacher plans the scope and sequence, pre-synthesizes and prepackages a lot of the learning. In the constuctivist classroom, the student is in charge of that packaging. The student gets amorphous information, the student gets ill-defined problems, and it's the student who has to put together his or her own personal question and figure out how to go about answering it with the teacher being the mediator of that meaning-making process.

Changing from a traditional classroom to one more rooted in the students' conceptualizations has never been a problem of access to information. So I don't think we need to look at the computer explosion in terms of its access to information as the link to a better educational experience. But we can look at the computer explosion as a mechanism by which students can express themselves, by which students can create new knowledge, and use computer tools as a, as a way of expressing their new creations.

What other things ought to happen to bring the promise of technology to constructivism? I think we need to ask a different question - how can students use technology to answer the questions that they are posing for themselves . Once the student has the question, the constructivist teacher will endorse any type of technology that will help that child answer his or her question.

I have had teachers with whom I worked tell me that once they have adopted, studied and adopted this new viewpoint , that they can't go back again. They can not go back to their original teaching, that once they have experienced the energy of their classroom and their students, forging together new understanding, and once they talk about how much they have learned about the concepts themselves, through collaborating with their students, that the traditional method simply doesn't hold the value it used to.

Approximately three weeks into the fellowship and things are really starting to move. Trips shave been booked to Southern Cross University in Lismore as well as ANU in Canberra. I'm particularly interested to learn about the ANU program and how they've remodelled the theory and aural courses there.

I had an initial meeting with music staff and team members, including Kathy Pingel, Phillip Gearing, Tamara Lester, Morgan Chalmers, Bruce Woodward and myself. The minutes from that meeting are attached. Tamara is to start conducing research into online aural training programs which might supplement our courses, and to commence a literature review on the topic of integrated music programs, integrated theory/aural courses. Morgan is keeping a database of musical examples from wide range of musich which can become a resource for staff teaching into the theory courses. Morgan (an honours student) helped with the tutoring of our theory courses in S2 2012 and did a fantastic job of contextualizing theoretical concepts for the students. The student feedback was excellent and I feel that this  needs to be one of our main goals - to ensure that we are currently making theoretical concepts 'real' to students by providing a wide range of examples and showing them how these concepts relate to their own music making.

Bruce Woodward, Rod Sims and I have had three sessions so far to discuss program redesign. This has been extremely useful for me in that I have not had the opportunity to do this before, but Rod has been so helpful in assisitng us to conceive of a bigger picture. Rod takes a top down approach to program design and we started with the questions:

What do we want our students to do (knowledge application)?

We want our students to engage with musical possiblities in diverse situations.

What are the learning outcomes?

• to communicate and critique musical concepts
• to create musical artefacts
• to recognize and appreciate musical diversity
• to value and apply co-construction
• to differentiate musical genres

So far, I'm happy with all of those learning outcomes apart from the last one which is a bit clunky and arguable comes under "musical diversity" in any case.

We then looked at a way in which the program itself might take shape. The two photos attached are the results of our brainstorming session. We broke the program into three years and for each year formulated a central question/s:

Year 1 - what is music? what is music for?

Year 2 - what can music do? what music can I make?

Year 3 - what is my music?

What we are aiming for is a truly integrated program, where areas are not artifially silo-ed for admininstrative convenience, but in which the true purpose of theory, aural and contextual studies is realised in the consistent application to practice.

From our discussions, it seems there are two parallet parts to this project. One is doing some blue-sky thinking on what the program might be in preparation for re-accrediation of the BCA. The other is the immediate challenge of re-conseptualizing our theory courses MUI1000 and MUI1004, as well as MUI20002, MUI3000 and MUI3001.

MUI1000 and MUI1004

MUI1000 and MUI1004 are traditional harmony courses. The course content is housed in written materials and lectures are delivered in the traditional weekly two-hourly format. Theses courses also contain parallet aural modules which are also run for two hours a week. Students find it difficult to extrapolate from the content to find the 'real world' relevance. They also struggle to keep up and to pass the assessment. Perhaps the most concerning aspect from a program design perspective is that the work done in these courses is not immediately applicable to the students' music-making in ensembles in the Music Practice courses. Even though students may have passed these courses many of them are not able to distil the basic principles which will help them in their everyday playing. For example, students are unable to 'spell' simple chords such as a C7, even though they would have encountered dominant chords consistently through MUI1000 and MUI1004. There is a missing link between the very valuable harmonic knowledge they gain in these courses and practical application, not only in playing but in improvising and composing or song-writing.

In discussions with Bruce, we both felt that the current structure of the courses (4 hours per week, with one lecturer teaching 13 weeks of harmony, and another teachng 13 weeks of aural concurrently) was unsustainable. Problems also arise when staff are on leave - other staff are not immediately able to step in and teach the courses. This became painfully evident in S2 2012 when both lecturers were away at the same time. 

What we've drafted is a propsed structure in which the courses are team-taught, with a one hour lecture and a one hour tutorial/workshop (see attached). Each course has three assessment items which are to create a musical artefact. Students may choose to do these assessments indivdually or collaboratively. This typw of activity relates to at five out of the six threshold learning outcomes (TLO's) for creative arts. Each course has three modules, to be taught by a different staff member, and each module culminates in a practical workshop where students present their assessment for that module.

I now need to present these thoughts to date to other staff for their input.

MUI3000 and MUI3001

These two courses again comprise of theory and aural modules. The theory module is orchestration and arranging. The uptake of the courses isince their introduction in 2011 has been fairly poor -

2011 -

MUI3000 – 4

MUI3001 – 4

2012 - 

MUI3000 – 5

MUI3001 – 4

2013 –

MUI3000 – 2

The proposal is to continue to offer this course externally as a Module (to be staffed on a supervisory basis), and to offer students the option of taking either that module or a new Module in contemporary production and arranging (to be offered online and on campus). The course would run as a series of three intensive workshops of 4 hours each with support online. Students would be able to collaborate on projects and collaboration between online and oncampus students would be actively encouraged.

MUI2002

The theory aspect of this course - songwriting - was wrttien at the start of 2012 by me. However at the time I failed to consider the aural module and how that might complement the work done in the theory module. Student feedback has since shown that this lack of integration or mutual re-enforcement is a problem for students.

I'm yet to consider the options for this course but will discuss it with Phillip throughout the semester.

I feel that the work we are doing with these courses can be guided by an overarching concept of what the Program can be, even if we cannot initiate all the aspects of the new program until re-accreditation. It makes sense to have the bigger picture in mind whilst working at the course level. Rod has been extremely helpful in that sense.

I've had a big breakthrough in my PhD study - in fact, I've changed my topic completely! If you are one of the music students from 2012, you may be interested to know what bought about this change...it was, in fact, you!

We made some big changes to music practice courses last year. It was scary for me, for the other staff, and for students who had started prior to 2012. It was scary because we were trying something new - something untested and a little bit risky. We started running group classes for first year music students - all in together, all instruments, all styles. Instead of individual lessons, we ran group instrument classes. All students played in small ensembles (rather than the traditional concert bands, brass bands, orchestras etc). Students had a voice in how the year progressed. It was a big gamble, that's for sure, as we are all accostomed to believing that the only way to learn practical music skills is by being taught individually.

There were a few hiccups, and we changed things as the year progressed, but all in all, this experiment led to a culture change in Music at USQ. The year was characterised by energy, enthusiasm, students helping each other, and a revived passion for learning,

I'm not saying it's perfect - we've still got a long way to go, and things to work out along the way, but I firmly believe it's a step in the right direction. I firmly believe we should be performing and making music together, learning about music together, and understanding music together. Not only does it help us become better musicians, it helps us learn a whole suite of skills which are transferable to any number of real-world work situations.

If you are interested in how this all progresses, follow my journal. I'll be posting regularly about my hopes, concerns, and plans, and I encourage feedback. In fact, I would be absolutely stoked if I received feedback on here! The idea is to create an open dialogue, where staff and students work together to make Music at USQ a leading light in tertiary music education. Sure, it's a big goal, but we should aim high, right?

"Aim high, and you won't shoot your foot off."
Phyllis Diller 

Today, hearing the first year singing class singing and jamming in my room while they were waiting for class to start, was really special.  I'm so excited to hear people spontaneously making music around the corridors of A Block!  Together with a fantastic day yesterday - thanks to Justin, Jaryd, Ayden's and Tom's ensembles - it's been a really great way to finish an otherwise trying week. Thanks guys!