LOOK AT WHAT I HEARD!
MUSIC LISTENING AND STUDENT-CREATED MUSICAL MAPS
Adviser: Jacqueline H. Wiggins, Ed.D.
2006 Dissertation Award, Oakland University
Enactive and iconic (graphic) representations of music are two of many ways musicians represent musical ideas. Student musicians also use enactive and iconic strategies to form musical ideas, represent musical ideas, and to express musical ideas. Through a qualitative study in which I, as teacher-researcher, observed my own fifth-grade music students, I came to value the ways they naturally used these strategies. Their musical expressions supported the notion of embodied cognition and the importance of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action as part of musical process while listening to music, thus enabling musical growth. Understanding the significance of these ideas led to the design of the final listening project in which students collaboratively created their own musical maps to represent a piece of music.
Essential meanings drawn from this project include the ways students came to understand, through experience, that there are common and unique ways of knowing and representing musical ideas, and that all these ways are valid and valuable. The mapping experience was valued for the creative way students could express musical ideas, but also for the way the map became a frame for the music, allowing students to have a conversation with the materials of sound and map, to use the map as a frame while responding to the music and creating the representation (reflection-in-action), but also as a frame for reliving the experience while sharing the map with others (reflection-on-action). The map became a metaphor for the musical experience, a graphic and enactive narrative of the process of forming musical ideas and of the salient musical ideas that students chose to represent.
An underlying emergent theme in this study was the evidence of student agency expressed by these students in their desire to grow musically and to be valued for what they know and who they are as musicians. This is connected to the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) as educators seek to enable students to grow in conceptual understanding (competence) and self-efficacy (confidence)—a reflexive relationship as students, too, seek to grow in musicianship (competence) and to be valued for who they are (confidence).
MUSIC LISTENING AND STUDENT-CREATED MUSICAL MAPS
Adviser: Jacqueline H. Wiggins, Ed.D.
2006 Dissertation Award, Oakland University
Enactive and iconic (graphic) representations of music are two of many ways musicians represent musical ideas. Student musicians also use enactive and iconic strategies to form musical ideas, represent musical ideas, and to express musical ideas. Through a qualitative study in which I, as teacher-researcher, observed my own fifth-grade music students, I came to value the ways they naturally used these strategies. Their musical expressions supported the notion of embodied cognition and the importance of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action as part of musical process while listening to music, thus enabling musical growth. Understanding the significance of these ideas led to the design of the final listening project in which students collaboratively created their own musical maps to represent a piece of music.
Essential meanings drawn from this project include the ways students came to understand, through experience, that there are common and unique ways of knowing and representing musical ideas, and that all these ways are valid and valuable. The mapping experience was valued for the creative way students could express musical ideas, but also for the way the map became a frame for the music, allowing students to have a conversation with the materials of sound and map, to use the map as a frame while responding to the music and creating the representation (reflection-in-action), but also as a frame for reliving the experience while sharing the map with others (reflection-on-action). The map became a metaphor for the musical experience, a graphic and enactive narrative of the process of forming musical ideas and of the salient musical ideas that students chose to represent.
An underlying emergent theme in this study was the evidence of student agency expressed by these students in their desire to grow musically and to be valued for what they know and who they are as musicians. This is connected to the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) as educators seek to enable students to grow in conceptual understanding (competence) and self-efficacy (confidence)—a reflexive relationship as students, too, seek to grow in musicianship (competence) and to be valued for who they are (confidence).
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