Experiential Learning
“Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something people do.”
Problem-Based Learning: Country Music
I had felt that HNR 2509 was half of a great course: for the first half I had adapted Place-as-Text pedagogy into a virtual exploration and mapping of Country music through listening to and making notes on 100 songs. At the midterm, students present their observations visually in a map, and write a Turning Point essay. This has worked well from the beginning, but has become even better as I incorporated more of the history of the genre. More consistent exposure to the very early songs, singing cowboys, Texas Swing, and Metropolitan Country have provided more structure to the project, and students encounter a greater variety of styles.
I had struggled to find an effective frame for the second half of the semester, trying a variety of crazy ideas and not being satisfied with any of them. For the Spring 24 iteration, I piloted a problem-based learning unit in which students created a mock record label, writing and recording a four-song EP, marketing it to the university community, and planning a “release party.” In so doing, I challenged myself to engage with music business topic well outside my sphere of experience while also creating space within the studio component of the course for activities beyond songwriting. Ideally, I hoped that students could bring expertise from their major fields to the course, thereby enhancing its relevance.
For a variety of reasons, things didn’t seem to go very well: student engagement is always low in the weeks following the mid-semester break, I felt unprepared to address the music business topics, and the creative team faced a disproportionate amount of work. I had almost written the project off as a failure by the final weeks of class, and devoted one of the last days to an open discussion on how I could improve the experience. To my surprise, the students’ response in both the discussion and the final reflections was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging, with some sound suggestions for improvement. The Release Day event also went remarkably well. I came away profoundly impressed with the students’ resilience and compassion, and, with revisions, I will keep the unit in the curriculum.
To lighten the load on the Creative team, I suggested that one of the songs on the EP be a cover. I never would have guessed that they would choose “Hey Good Looking” by Hank Williams !
Field Work
MUS 1600 Human Dimensions of Music traditionally included a concert attendance component, and students were typically given a performance schedule of concerts offered by the department as their only choices. When I was assigned to teach the course for the Summer On-Line program, it occurred to me that, since the students would be in different cities across the country, I could get a much more interesting results by requiring that they attend musical events… any musical events, including karaoke nights, live music at restaurants, street fairs, etc. wherever they were. The results were astonishing: the projects came back with profound stories of authentic engagement in musical cultures and observations of the meaning and value of music in peoples’ lives. My favorite came from a student who went to the local Irish pub and came away feeling underwhelmed and left out. So… he called several of his friends, and went back (!) the next night. The Live Music Project has been a staple in the course ever since, and has gained additional nuance as I have become more involved with both Place-as-Text pedagogy and the Sociology of Music literature.
I included the project when I reworked the course as a Freshman Seminar, along with the Religious Music project, in which students observe the spiritual effects of music at a religious service of their choice, and “Music and Movement,” in which students go dancing, to an exercise class, or make a TikTok dance video. My next epiphany, however, came when I took groups of students in HNR 2509 Aesthetic Inquiry: Country Music, to Ziggy’s, a live music venue in High Point, to hear Joe Nichols and Creed Fisher. Attending these shows in a smaller, local venue, with a crowd or working-class people ready to put their work behind them on a Friday night, transformed my understanding of Country music’s value to its listeners. The students were equally impressed, and we came away convinced that the music couldn’t really be understood without the experience of it in community.
Field work has been central to my pedagogy and research ever since: in addition to leading the City-as-Text course HNR 2513 Musical Culture in Foot in Prague, CZ, my own explorations have included taking Ballroom Dancing lessons, seeing and dancing to Joel Corry and Deadmau5 at the Breakaway Festival, and head-banging to metal bands Mayhem, Cannibal Corpse, and Oblivion Throne.
Final Showcases
For my courses, a comprehensive final exam doesn’t seem to provide an adequate measure of student learning. I would prefer for them to take ownership of the course material, and complete final papers or projects because they matter. Accordingly, all of my course conclude with a showcase of student work. This not only shifts the emphasis from “satisfying me” to “doing something interesting,” but also provides experience in the real-world context of academic/professional conferences. In my most spectacular application, students in my Fall 2023 HNR 3603 Music and Identity course actually organized a full mock-conference, in which they submitted abstracts of their final papers, and then formed committees to assign them to a presentation format, set the schedule, assign moderators for panel discussions, and take care of publicity (the conference program and other information is available on the course website)
My freshman seminar, DIS 1000 Music, Resilience, and Life Skills concludes with a “poster” session, in which students present their course ePortfolios to invited guests from the HPU faculty, staff, and administration. This not only allows them to reflect on the totality of their course work, but also to build relationships within their majors and the larger university community.
Problem-Based Learning: Early Music
In the final years of the the comprehensive musicianship curriculum, I challenged myself to think bigger. The courses were becoming altogether too passive, and I wanted to do something more engaging and more creative. I had been thinking about Problem-Based Learning and had the idea to create a unit-long project in which the students would prepare a section of the earliest surviving opera, Jacopo Peri’s (1561-1633) Euridice (1600). I was less concerned with historical accuracy than with their ability to transcribe the original notation, realize the figured bass, and at least experiment with improvisation. I also had them research the work and its significance, and let other performance issues emerge naturally. They worked out some simple staging and a rather whimsical backdrop, then surprised me by inviting the Music Theory class that met during the same period to the in-class performance. While there was still room for refinement, I learned a lot from this project, and began re-working other units along similar lines. Later in the semester, I was awarded a $6000 grant from the Quality Enhancement office that I used to buy a small collection of Renaissance instruments: a consort of recorders, alto and tenor rebecs, and a lute. As a condition of the grant, I ran an action study to see if these PBL units promoted a Growth Mindset (IRB Protocol 201908-833).
While I had some success in the individual classes: the early music ensemble performed a short program of Medieval and Renaissance music at the Pennybyrne retirement facility, the study overall was a disaster. The class sizes were already small, but after the first semester, two students dropped the major, I found out that only three of the others had signed the consent forms, and then the 2020 Pandemic made any sort of performing problematic.
After consulting the QEP director, I modified the study to involve music programming using the ChucK computer language, which I thought would be equivalent to learning and performing unfamiliar music on a new instrument. I used the remaining grant money to buy a set of Bluetooth speakers in hopes of creating a laptop ensemble. The project wasn’t entirely successful, but I later repurposed the material into a new course, MUS 1650 Coding Musical Soundscapes.