Go Fish
I often encounter the following Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for lifetime.” But I’m not always certain that I live by it enough in the classroom. As we often say in education, our job as teachers is not to give students the answers but to show them how to find the answers. We are not encouraging them just to learn for our test, but to be a lifetime learner. Whenever we create a special resource for our students, we may be denying them a profound learning opportunity.
An educational technology expert recently introduced me to a wonderful iPad app called ScreenChomp. ScreenChomp allows iPad users to create video tutorials from interactive screen shots with full annotation capability. Primary and secondary education teachers already engage with this application to archive video demonstrations of math calculations, verb conjugations, and other resources on course management sites.
I immediately began experimenting with ScreenChomp, as there are several complex demonstrations I often repeat for students after class and during office hours that could easily be uploaded to MOODLE. As I drafted a list of videos to create–“How to find the thesis statement in a scholarly article,” “How to invert a dominant seventh chord,” How to complete a Babbitt, 12-tone matrix, “How to distinguish members of the saxophone family,” etc.–I thought about how much my students will love me for such an extensive body of resources.
Yet, as the fog of self-absorption dissipated I began to have second thoughts. Why do I need to demonstrate these abilities? Aren’t students supposed to demonstrate these outcomes? Bingo! I’ll have the students make the videos. Although having students create peer learning resources is not new, this seemed to provide a better model. Furthermore, making instructional videos adds a bit of permenance to student presentations. Unlike live presentations, videos will remain in circulation. The performance doesn’t end.
The transfer of responsibility from the professor to the student is a good thing. My students have occasionally asked me to pronounce a word on their Powerpoint slide during a presentation. Why should I answer? Aren’t they in the position of expert? Did they not seek resources online and in the library to learn how to pronounce it ahead of time? And most importantly, would they be able to ask me in the middle of an instructional video to pronounce a word for them? I think not. Cue resourcefulness, preplanning, and revision. The work that goes into a video with unknown distribution far exceeds the minimum requirements for delivering a single performance to a finite audience. Any engaged learning activity should develop transferable skills, skills rooted in the liberal arts and applicable to a variety of disciplines and careers. When we catch fish for our students, we deny them an opportunity to master these skills.
Good Enough for Jazz
Jazz improvisation is a challenging concept for undergraduate, non music majors to grasp. One can either offer vague descriptions of expressing the soul or attempt to simplify complex patterns of harmony. Neither angle proves satisfying, as non majors have difficulty relating to the process by which a self-taught musician channels emotions with convincing melodic gestures and a thoroughly-trained musician sequences complex chordal structures with ease. Professional musicians are either uncannily talented or exhaustively schooled in music theory.
But I am convinced that non music majors can try their hand at improvisation as well. And it is important that they engage in the behavior of solo and group improvisation to fully appreciate the creative process that defines jazz. Group performances of modal jazz changes, the scale-based form found in Miles Davis’s “So What” from Kind of Blue, make this opportunity quite accessible. Not only do students piece together components of the jazz ensemble, they have an ability to shape their own creative voice through several phases of improvisation. A comprehensive knowledge of jazz harmony and standard changes is not required and not really necessary for non music majors. Students in this exercise are protected from playing “wrong notes.”
The modal changes in “So What” are relatively simple. The “head” is in D dorian and the “bridge” is in E-flat dorian. Each chorus is a conventional AABA, 32-bar cycle. In even simpler terms, the white keys of the piano form the basis of “A” and the black keys of the piano (plus F and C if you really want) form the basis of “B.” Several rhythm section practice tracks (with a walking double bass and drum set) are available for these modal changes, or you can have students use Garage Band on iPads to construct a walking bass line and basic swing pattern on the ride cymbal.
The exercise is broken into 4 phases before free improvisation can take place within the ensemble. In phase 1, a piano soloist explores rich harmonies using the notes of the modal scales. I instruct students to “comp,” that is to freely articulate chords from any notes in the scale, that is any notes they want from the white and then black keys of the piano. Students are encouraged to spread their fingers in order to shape extended harmonies with wide voicing rather than the dissonant tonal clusters that result when their fingers are closed. In phase 2, students engage in variations of a thematic motive. They develop a short melodic gesture of 4-8 notes from the scale then attempt to vary it with slight changes in pitch, length, and rhythm. Some even advance their technique by using inversion, parallel harmonies, or imitation between the right and left hand. Again, as long as they know when to shift from the white keys to the black keys within the form, they avoid unpleasant notes. In phase 3, students employ a hybrid of chordal comping and melodic motivic variation to convey two contrasting moods, tranquility for the head and agitation for the bridge. Students tend to employ soft dynamics, slower rhythms, and light or legato articulations for tranquility and loud dynamics, quicker rhythms, and accented articulations for agitation. In phase 4, the final phase, two student soloists engage in a conversation, a technique jazz musicians often refer to as “trading twos.” Student A introduces a short melodic/harmonic gesture on one piano and Student B answers with something complimentary or contrasting on another piano. In some situations, a student playing a walking bass line on the iPad may also participate in the conversation.
Although this is a rather simplified reconstruction of “So What” changes, students have an opportunity to engage in the behavior of improvisation, both individually and collectively. Despite some resistance from a few individuals who do not want to play in front of their peers, the exercise yields a positive response in the classroom. Many students are surprised when they hear how well they sound along with the rhythm section. I require a post jam session discussion and ask that students reflect critically on the behavior of improvisation. How does jazz engage members of the ensemble in creative collaboration? What messages can a jazz soloist communicate to attentive listeners? What are the roles and responsibilities of each member of the rhythm section? What are the aesthetics of evaluating convincing solos?
Google Information Literacy
This summer I’m revising the library projects in my music history sequence for music majors. Working with an instructional librarian is truly a wonderful experience. A short meeting and series of quick emails later and I found exactly what I needed on my desk: a current version of both the American Library Association’s standards for Information Literacy and the Music Library Association’s instructional objectives for meeting these standards in a music curriculum, as well as an article in the Music Library Association’s journal on weaving sequential library instruction into the music curriculum. Seriously, Instructional Librarians are better than Google!
And this is exactly what the curricular library projects should show students today: information literacy for the Google Age. Google is an incredible resource and I use it all the time to find the nearest Chipotle, the spelling of Dohnanyi, and the hours the campus library is open. But it’s not going to yield the best resources for student research if used in this way.
Library projects should be an entirely transparent experience for students. Introducing the class to various media in the library (scholarly articles, critical editions scores, discographies, etc.) does little to develop a critical research acumen when the objectives are not discussed in current contexts. Today’s students are not going to kick the search engine habit unless our library projects show them the potential pitfalls of passive research.
As Nicholas Carr has argued in his recent book, The Shallows, there is a question of ethics whenever one engages in a new form of technology. To him, the search engine has cultivated high skills in skimming vast quantities of information quickly but has hindered the ability for deep concentration and reflection. This idea reminds me of the findings of the Collegiate Learning Assessment as reported by Arum and Roska in Academically Adrift. Students are neither assigned nor held fully accountable for reading and writing large, complex texts in the college experience. Many pass courses and graduate without them.
This argument is reflected in the library project as well. Requiring students to construct bibliographies and request a source through interlibrary loan for a single assignment has as much benefit for good information literacy habits as Milton Babbitt has for getting non music majors to buy season tickets to the symphony. Students need to see (and fall for) the potential risks of lazy research.
My intent, at this early point in the summer, is to engage my first semester music history class in an information literacy duel. Google teams will be pitted against the wisdom of the instructional librarian in accessing current, authoritative, relevant, and bias sources, to use the CARB technique of evaluating sources. Controversial figures in music history, Hans Pfitzner and Dmitri Shostakovich to name a couple, will demonstrate the fallacy of believing everything in print (both on paper and the screen). Although library stacks also house sources with questionable information, the point will be that good information literacy yields resources vetted by the researcher and not ranked by other factors (i.e. company purchases).
It is not enough that a single designated course and assignment walk students through the motions of accessing and evaluating a variety of sources in the library. We should hold students in all of our courses, especially upper-level courses, accountable. In recent semesters, I’ve begun cringing at the reference slides of student Powerpoint presentations that are littered with URLs of ehow.com and answers.yahoo.com. I wouldn’t be caught dead posing as an expert on a topic with those resources displayed for a room of my peers. When students are confident in attaching their names to that type of research, it’s a serious problem.
Who’s Got the Blues?
I woke (E) up this mornin’ and didn’t know what to teach in class…yeah-yeah-be-dah-daw-de-daw (E7)
I woke (A) up this mornin’ and didn’t (Am) know what to teach in class (E)…yeah-ye-yeah-ye-yaw-be-bah-be-baw (E7)
So I got (B7) to just remember not to be (A7) that ol’ bumblin’ ass (E-E7-F#m11-Go7-E9-F13-E13)
This past spring faculty at my institution gathered in a development workshop on “performance learning,” which reminded me of an activity I regularly build into my courses for non majors. But the organizers of the workshop defined “performance learning” in more specific contexts than the familiar expression “performance-based learning.” Performance meant a public performance with an audience and the student in the spotlight, and the goal was learning how to harness the motivation that drives student athletes before the big game. A significant event, such as a final exam, was not the only factor; it was the public exposure in front of teammates, fans, and family. How can a public performance bring the best out of students and their learning?
For several semesters of music appreciation, I’ve engaged students in a compositional activity to learn the blues. After studying examples by Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, and W. C. Handy, students are to author several stanzas of blues text, sequence the characteristic harmonies, and describe the musical expressions of the text with each line. I italicize “describe” because before this workshop I never actually expected the non music majors to demonstrate their understanding by actually performing their compositions. I was wrong.
Thank you Garage Band and iPad for making this possible. The new version of this assignment now requires teams of students to perform the blues for the class. In addition to the steps described above, students choose instruments on Garage Band (drum set, guitar, piano, string bass, etc.) and along with a singer play their compositions. The “smart” function for instruments in the iPad app allows students to preset chords in the harmony so they can easily simulate the act of playing the instruments. In many ways this resembles the level of difficulty one experiences in Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Everyone in the class can participate.
The added benefits of this experience are noteworthy. For one, students are pushed to act outside of their comfort zone and to demonstrate some level of competence in the area. Second, students must have mastered basic musicianship skills of counting measures and staying with the beat, both crucial to developing active listening habits. Outcomes such as these go beyond the “content knowledge of blues” to demonstrating relevant skills that will assist them throughout the course and will likely have a lasting impact on their interest in the music.
The Curriculum Crasher 