Critical Reflection and ePortfolio
“Folio thinking aims to encourage students to integrate discrete learning experiences, enhance their self-understanding, promote taking responsibility for their own learning, and support them in developing an intellectual identity.”
From MUS 1600 to DIS 1000: The Story of a Course
In Fall 2016, the HPU Music Department weathered something of a perfect storm: a precipitous drop in Freshman enrollment unfortunately coincided with both a restructuring of the major curriculum and a study-abroad program involving most of our majors. In an instant, I found my major courses virtually empty, and I was assigned to our gen ed music appreciation course, MUS 1600 Human Dimensions of Music. I asked the previous instructor for a syllabus, and taught my first two semesters more or less as it had been taught, although with some reduction of the emphasis on the nineteenth century and adding a sort of “musical life history” assignment to get a sense of music’s role in the students’ lives.
I found myself unhappy with the results, however. I didn’t like the text, and I found myself sympathizing with the disengagement of students who listened almost exclusively to Hip-hop and Country, and whose experience with high-energy arena-style concerts made the campus ensemble performances seem dull and stuffy. After some research, I re-wrote the course around the sociology of music, using the text Music: a Social Experience by Steven Cornelius and Mary Natwig. After two semesters (Fall 2017 and Spring 2018), my responsibilities in honors and the department precluded me from teaching the course, but I coordinated two adjunct instructors using the syllabus through the following academic year.
I was next contracted to teach MUS 1600 as an online summer course beginning in 2019. It was her that I began exploring the theme of “music makes your life better” and incorporating composition assignments using the free online DAW Soundtrap. During the summer of 2020, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I made resilience and hope the focus of the course, and dropped the Cornelius/Natwig text in favor of The Music within You by Shelley Katsh and Carole Merle-Fishman.
MUS 1600 Course Portfolio
First ePortfolio Implementation: MUS 1600 SOL (online) Summer 2021
This first iteration incorporated both the composition projects and the small-scale Place-as-Text experiences I had used previously, in addition to an integrative “Connection to Your Major” project I stole from Dr. Darrel Bailey at IUPUI. The online Summer course presented an opportunity to experiment with a small group of students, and I created a model site (linked above) in order to give them a sense of what I was after. Dr. Bailey’s project turned out to be one of the most popular elements of the course.
Emily Putnam
Anthony Sica
Second Implementation: MUS 1600 (in-person) Fall 2021
This course built on the experience of the online course and expanded on some of the topics, both to fill out the fifteen-week schedule, and to address some omissions. In particular, I added an opening section on ambient music that seemed to work well, made a connection with the Office of Counselling Services that I hope to develop going forward, and invited a number of faculty and staff colleagues to the final showcase. There were some difficulties, both with the design and in managing the course’s thirty-eight students. The student’s energy predictably slackened in the second half of the semester, just as we shifted from the creative work to reading/discussion. Accordingly, the discussions became rather tortuous—I’m going to explore either mixing up the schedule, adding more creative work, or both. As regards class management, I divided the students into eight groups and condensed several assignments, which had pros and cons..
Group 1: “Able”
Group 3: “Charlie”
Transition to DIS 1000: Music, Resilience, and Life Skills
After watching the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health and academic skills of the students, and particularly the Freshmen, I became concerned about the quality of their first experiences on campus. I was already working to demystify the “hidden curriculum” and provide guidance and practice in basic college work (taking notes, studying, research, and writing), and when the opportunity to develop a a first-year seminar course (what we call “Intellectual Discovery”) in the new HPU Lead gen ed curriculum, I jumped at the chance. I adapted MUS 1600 to the new course outcomes, incorporated a substantial component from Jessica S. Gifford’s Resiliency Skills Training program (which I downloaded from the Academic Resiliency Consortium’s library), and, in order to help it pass through the committees, gave it the most buzz-wordy title I could manage. It felt a little dirty, but it worked. The title even captured the imagination of the Associate Provost, who tagged the course for inclusion in a Learning Community initiative.
It took some time for me to get used to thinking of the class as a true resiliency course instead of a music gen ed, and by the final showcase, I was embarrassed to realize that all of the resiliency work was sequestered in the course journals on Blackboard—nowhere evident in the ePortfolios. In the following semester, I revamped the entire model site, adding a “Resilience” page for the journals, and placing the reflections on the home page.
With the Learning Community initiative, the course was paired with Music Theory, which was an odd match. The course was intended for non-majors, and I had to adapt many of the “yes, you are musical” assignments, and find some creative alternatives to the “Connection to Your Major” project to accommodate the students who had already formed their identity around music.
While it was not a homerun success, I was happy with the course’s potential, and made a number of refinements to the Spring 2023 iteration.