Month: April 2018

Posted on

Learning in Laboratories (Allsup)

In Chapter 3, Learning in Laboratories, Randall Allsup talks at length about the balance between laboratories and museums in educational settings. Allsup’s ideas are centered around the writings of John Dewey, especially The School and Society. Allsup describes Dewey’s ideal school setting as one “that houses a museum at the center of the building with openings on four sides leading to chemistry, biology, art, and music labs.” Dewey also says that information should be flowing in both directions, “the art work might be considered to be that of the shops laboratories, studios, and work spaces, passed through the alembic of library and museum into action again.” Allsup concludes this thought by saying, “the museum is not a building where dead objects go but a living space of invention and reinvention, a vital heart, a text. The laboratory is a place of patience and action, where knowledge is sent in arterial fashion into the world and back. The school, like life, is alive with its pulse.”

Turning now to the subject of marching band, how does the activity live up to Dewey’s ideal? No one can argue at the advancements made in the last 20 years in marching band show design.

In some schools, directors are still creating everything in house. Either spending their weekends and summers writing their own charts and drill or purchasing pre-made, stock arrangements and shows. However, many schools are now outsourcing their design needs to industry experts with many years of experience, usually in both high school marching band as well as drum corps. These design teams, consisting of music arrangers, drill writers, set designers, and costume designers, work together to design one-of-a-kind, original shows for the marching band to perform. The resulting products are much more intricate, complex, stimulating and demanding on the performers than shows from the last few decades of the 20th-century. From this view, there’s little doubt that the laboratory is alive and well in marching band.

But is it?

Turning to a different metaphor, how would Dewey (or Allsup) feel about the elementary school music teacher who, one summer, goes out a buys a new class set of music books. These books include the latest songs from popular culture and are written to be played on recorders. The songs in this new book sound very different from the class’s earlier book, that was made up of simple arrangements of Mozart melodies. The students, upon opening the new books, are thrilled to be playing music they recognize. There’s a renewed since of energy in the music classroom as they begin the new school year.

Obviously, some change is happening in both setting described above, but is it the laboratories of change that Dewey and Allsup describe? Unless the actual instruction changes or the manner in which the students are allowed to interact with the art form changes, then I would argue no.

What’s missing is the “tension” that Allsup describes in his book. School should be “a location that serves society through the preservation of past accomplishment and agreed-on cultural standards, as well as through the expectation of new discoveries and reimagined practice.” Those new discoveries and reimagined practices need to take place in school and with the students. Just because marching band show design advances, composers write in new styles, or a pop-musicians drop new albums isn’t enough. We need to open these doors with our students and help them explore the changing world of music. Experienced music students can tell the difference between a good and bad marching band. They have a grasp on the “agreed-on cultural standards.” Few take the time, however, to consider how a certain show concept could be “reimagined.” Even fewer are actually given opportunities to explore those ideas and put them into practice. Marching band is one of the most popular aspects of the high school music curriculum. It’s time for us to start using it in ways that actually better our students.

Posted on

Allsup – Remixing the Classroom

Randall Allsup opens his book Remixing the Classroom with three stories that point toward the differences between open and closed forms of education. In a style similar to Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education, these stories help Allsup lay the foundation of his argument of an open philosophy of music education. These ideas are similar to ones that Jorgensen discussed at various times in Pictures. Jorgensen cautioned us with her metaphors, attempting to show that while there are obvious benefits to certain teaching styles, they are not without their consequences.

Near the beginning of Chapter 1 Allsup is describing Dapper Dan’s Boutique and how his fashion designed was marked with innovation and a lack of conformity. Allsup continued, “And unlike today’s schools, measurement and assessment, essential aspects of the creative process, were reached through qualitative, idiosyncratically defined means.” My take away from this paragraph is a strong disapproval of assessment (epically summative assessment) in lieu of a flexible, artistic, and unpredictable experience.

My mind immediately went to band programs in this country, where contests and assessment are highly emphasized. But what if there was more gray area in those assessments than we realize? What if the problem wasn’t whether or not we should have assessment? Perhaps the problem lies is who those assessments are really for.

As a teacher, I was usually highly stressed in October, and again in April, as the annual UIL contests for Marching Band and Concert & Sightreading approached. My stress was rooted in my desire for my students to have a positive experience, a culminating event where they could showcase the work they had put in up to that point. The ratings mattered to them, but they mattered more for me.

What was more important and valuable to my students was the formative assessments they received each day in rehearsals, sectionals, and private lessons. I had the inside knowledge of where each student’s abilities laid at the beginning of the school year or rehearsal cycle, and I could assess how those abilities grew.

Where those summative assessments had a small, momentary impact on my students, they were my lifeblood. To outsiders, to people teaching in other schools in my region, to Fine Arts Directors at those districts I wished to one day work at, the summative assessments that we received at those contests determined my worth as an educator. That’s not to say that they don’t understand the difference between formative and summative assessment or that they don’t value to growth a student makes, but when looking through stacks of hundreds of applications it’s an easy way to start categorizing. Over the course of several years, my students make some wonderful advancements in their musical abilities. Growth that I was extremely proud of. But we never reached what the UIL considered “superior” and my worth as an educator was deemed lower.

To me, systems that rob teachers of their confidence and is more of a detriment to a student’s education.

Zooming our lens out a little further, the problem with closed vs open systems and ideas of master-apprentice style teaching only becomes a problem if a teacher begins to change their teaching in a way that puts those summative assessments and the opinions of others ahead of the growth and education of their students. You see this a lot, where the only goal of a music program is to win a certain contest or achieve a certain mark. That’s when a closed system is used for power, control, and the fulfillment of a teacher’s goals rather than the student’s.

I think that we can make a bigger impact on the quality of music education in this country by finding ways of better supporting our teachers. As the public becomes increasingly critical of teachers and more education “experts” write about what’s wrong with classroom dynamics and its hierarchy, we are slowly losing our educators. People who have a gift for impacting the lives of young people find themselves perusing other careers. Assuming we didn’t hire already broken teachers, perhaps a better question to be asking is – what are we doing that’s breaking them?

Posted on

Factory and Production (Jorgensen)

In reading Chapter 6 “Factory and Production” of Estelle Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education, I was conflicted with her view of music education as a factory enterprise. More specifically, the undertone that factories, with their “standardized machines, parts processes, and products”, might be great for making potato chips but are awful at producing music students. I believe that these large-scale operations, the large ensembles in the music education sphere, do not, as Jorgensen states, “undermine the power and life of musical traditions,” but instead provide great arenas for the development of students.

In describing her factory metaphor, Jorgensen touches briefly on the idea of specialization. Factory workers specialize on a specific aspect of the assembly process as “multiple repetitions of particular tasks suggest that the quality of a potato chip made by a team of specialists may be more uniform than one made entirely by generalists.” While not stated outright, I believe Jorgensen is insinuating that schools that are setup like a factory result in teacher’s that are unable to teach the whole student and that course curriculum becomes too narrowly focused on a teacher’s skill and thus the students are robbed of a full education. I believe that specialization is a positive power that schools should do a better job of harnessing. The most successful band programs I’ve seen have a team of teachers that are highly skilled, specialized, and most importantly, complementary of each other’s skill sets. Specialization only becomes a problem when you hire a group of teachers that all do the same thing well. A dynamic and diverse group of educators is the best way to provide a quality education.

Factories, over time, have become more efficient, allowing for a greater creation of goods at a lower price. These factory improvements, while perhaps good for the general public (lower cost goods) has had a negative impact on the workers inside the factory. Adding in the idea of the factory manager who is looking to cut costs, I’ve seen first-hand school administrators whose main consideration for determining whether or not a class will exist in the course catalog is the number of students that that class can hold a given time. My former administrators were much more interested in having a general Music History class that could hold 35-plus students at a time, than they were in having an International Baccalaureate Diploma Level course that would serve five students. The result was those five students who were most interested and invested in furthering their music education were pushed aside so that the school could find a place to essentially hold the school’s over-populated student body for 90 minutes. In this case, the factory failed its workers and its customers.

The factory is described as becoming less of a human-intensive operation. Think for a moment about a freshman-level English class in college. You have a large number of students, low levels (if any) of one-on-one interaction between professor and student, department mandated materials/literature, and perhaps automated, uninterested faculty. I’d argue that the music classroom (thinking now about large ensemble in either HS or MS) is similar to the English class only in terms of size. Unlike a large lecture setting, large ensembles allow every member to participate in the class discussion, as it were, at the same time. Like a class discussion, some students might have similar or differing thoughts and opinions, and a quality teacher (director) should be able to direct the conversation/musical performance towards the end goal. Furthermore, I’d argue that there can be (and should be) the flexibility for the teacher to change their opinion of that end (musical) goal based on a student’s thoughts.

At this point the large ensemble begins to look less like a mechanized operation and more like a hive mind. At first glance it could look like the bees of the hive are acting like machines. Caring out these highly specialized and specific tasks that allow the hive to survive. However, with a closer look you’ll notice that working together, in large numbers, does not equate to machinery. Independent organisms are working together, under the watchful eye of the queen, to accomplish their goal. For the bees, it’s survival. For the musicians, it’s art.