Friday, April 24, 2015
Interdisciplinary Connections
While much of what I read from this weeks chapter was interesting and informative, it was the section on interdisciplinary connections in music education that I found to be particularly interesting. This concept is something that I have encountered frequently when teaching at the elementary level, and it is something that I have often found difficult to achieve. I suppose that the reason for this is that personally I have a hard time integrating other subjects in a natural way WHEN IT MUST BE DONE IN AN EXPLICIT AND/OR OVERT MANNER. What I mean by this is when, for example, and I am asked how I incorporate other subjects into the music classroom. I suppose that to me other subjects find their way into teaching music very organically. I find myself talking about contemporary historical figures, teaching correct pronunciations, reviewing fractions (i.e. "how many eighth notes fit inside a quarter note?"), etc., just by being myself. I am not trying to suggest that every music teacher has the same experiences and abilities that I do, just that I sometimes struggle with actually describing HOW it is incorporated. I definitely appreciated the suggestions for integrating subjects in the music classroom, and I do believe that they will make more deliberate integration easier for me in the future. What I found to be more intriguing, however, was the idea that some teachers feel that this integration and feel superficial, or cheapen the actual music education (Bauer, 2014, p. 120). This made me realize that I tend to feel this way when I am asked to describe how what I teach is interdisciplinary. In a lot of ways I can completely understand wanting to know exactly how this is done. After all, we need to be held accountable for what we teach. I suppose that at the end of the day, I feel as though trying to plan out exactly how my teaching is interdisciplinary removes a great deal of humanity from my teaching, and likewise brings an uncomfortable artificiality to it. I am not saying that this is the reality of the situation, but it is certainly my own perception. And after all, whose to say that an individual's perception isn't one and the same with their own version of reality?
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Hello there! I completely agree with you, I also have a hard time integrating interdisciplinary content in my lessons in an explicit manner. I too like to let this kind of integration happen organically. In fact, for me, most of the time this happens when the classroom teachers and I have a brief discussion about the content of our lessons when I am returning the students back to the teacher. We don't spend hours planning out a lesson, it just seems to work out.
ReplyDeleteI feel like in almost every way, music is interdisciplinary and we just don't realize it. For instance, most teachers (even though I can't speak for everyone), when teaching about composers, also throw in some content about that period of history. We are always teaching reading comprehension in some form. We expect our students to read the music and understand it. Again, I agree with you that integrating other content into our music lessons needs to be organic and I feel like it many ways, music is organically interdisciplinary.
I also meant to say that I enjoyed reading your post! :)
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post! I completely understand your frustration with having to justify how you are integrating the other subjects into your teaching. We need to defend ourselves and link what we teach in with the rest of the curriculum, often without any guidance or resources. Why should we do it? After all, the classroom teachers / core classes / academic teachers don't have to integrate the arts into their classroom or show evidence of it!
ReplyDeleteI truely believe that music can be (and is) very easily interdiscipinary, and you did a great job on identifying different ways that you do integrate the students' other learning into your classroom. Through my work with arts integration at my new magnet school, I have realized the importance of making connections between the subjects. It allows the students to deepen their learning and demands that they use ciritical thinking skills. Integrating music with history or science not only deepends their understanding of history or science, but it also allows the students to have a deeper appreciation.
There are many natural connections between music and the other subjects - it's just difficult to find the time to find the time to research the connections and even more difficult to find the time to teach them. But it needs to be taken as small steps - it might be singing a counting song with Kindergarteners, or it might be something more complicated like the music of the Revolution. Whether big or small, making those connections will make your students better learners and better musicians and students!
Megan