Secondary pedagogy session
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As we perform, listen to, and move to music, we might well ask: What does this music say about me, as well as those around me? Let’s explore ways to leverage cultural forces so we might transform our classrooms into vantage points. Through exposure to strategies drawn from Harvard’s seminal Project Zero work, participants take a deep dive into a range of music activities that promote the valuing of their own perspectives alongside those of others. In performing and interacting with works by popular First Nations artists Thelma Plum and Baker Boy, we uncover hidden stories, back stories, and our own stories. Through “True for Who?” experiences, we reflect critically on our own assumptions about the Western canon. These key questions are investigated: How might teachers model broad perspective-taking for their students? What questioning strategies and learning opportunities are helpful in pushing students beyond the familiar?
Panel – Candace Kruger, Tracy Wong, Ed Le Brocq– moderated by Andrew Pennay
A discussion about access to and content of music education in our schools and communities.
From the recently-released to the “why didn’t I know about this before?”, there are some incredibly useful tech tools available that can help empower student learning in music education. Technology can provide opportunities to differentiate learning quickly and effectively through apps and browser extensions that are readily available and mostly free to use.
Attendees will discover apps that allow students to snap a photo of their sheet music in order to play it back or transpose it quickly. We’ll look at rehearsal and transcription tools that will change the tempo of videos and audio recordings without changing the pitch, plus set up short practice loops, transpose songs and bookmark important sections of a piece to enable quick navigation. Learn how to create instructional playalong videos that show synchronised notation on screen. Discover an on-screen keyboard that displays notes that are pressed and identifies chords in real-time – just like the keyboard tutorials you see on Youtube. Explore the in-sync lyrics in apps like Spotify and Apple Music to speed up the learning of songs. Learn how to make your own screen tutorials or verbal/visual feedback videos that allow students to pause or rewind the teacher and more!
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children’s views should be given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child. The research literature refers to this as student agency. In a recent report from the Australian Human Rights Commission, children nationwide stated that “having a say in matters that are important to them” is a right that is “least true” for them. The same report recommended that solutions to this should be investigated as a national priority. However, despite the awareness of student agency as a national human rights issue little change has occurred in recent years beyond the growth of student agency as an educational buzzword.
In this presentation, we will look at how different conceptions of agency play out in a Kodaly-informed music classroom. We will take a critical look at where Kodaly-informed pedagogy is in troubled dialogue with practices that support student agency. As well as gently push back against shallow conceptions that reduce student agency to simply song choice, projects on orchestral instruments, and favourite band posters.
This presentation is based on research completed in a Kodaly-informed music classroom in a Victorian government secondary school.
This session will be hands-on, voices-on, practical and interactive. We will experience and explore many different ways in which the fundamental solfa system can be applied and of great benefit to your choir. The rewards are finer tuning and higher levels of musicianship. We will cover vocal and body warm-ups, canons, part-songs and repertoire, all infused with solfa.
In historicising and problematising Australia’s national instinct to devalue artistic curiosity through our state-based syllabi, we must embrace a creative way forward for Kodály-based music programs in primary and secondary contexts. Ever curiouser and curiouser, and with eight lives remaining, the feline bites back in this session, providing eight strategies for embracing curiosity in the music classroom. Through the lens of Ron Ritchhart’s cultural forces, we examine our own pedagogical practices to find playful opportunities for wonder, awe and excitement when performing and responding to culturally diverse repertoire. In considering our use of time, the way we interact with students, our assessment practices, our language moves, and even our physical environment, let’s push for genuine inquisitiveness as music learners come to value historically under-represented voices. We’ve still got eight more shots at this.