Summary Reflection

In this course, Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Music Education, several topics were explored that have benefitted my music teaching and will affect how I continue to teach my students.  The topics, history of music education in America, philosophical positions, aesthetics, purposes of education, and sociological, social psychological, and psychological concepts of music education, each will impact my choices in lesson planning in the future.

The history of music education in America is important to know because what has happened in history has directly impacted what is happening today.  When American education was initially organized, most students learned music in their homes as families gathered around the piano and learned instruments to make music together.  While this was the case for my very musical family, it is no longer the case for the majority of my students.  Music educators have had to argue to get music into the schools from the very beginning, and we are continually advocating today to keep music in the schools.  Understanding Lowell Mason's ideas about why music education should be part of the school day, including the development of character in students, the influence of music as an important part of the intellect, and the concept of the physical exercise required to make vocal music can serve as a foundation for my own advocacy arguments.  In addition, I found it interesting that Lowell Mason pushed for vocal music because not all students could afford instruments.  In my extremely low-income school, the affordance of instruments is always a major problem.  I have thought before about including mostly vocal and singing exercises in my classroom to develop my students' ears and voices first, and understanding that vocal music was historically the offering of public schools can be good evidence for my choice to use mostly vocal music.  In the future, I will continue to teach students how to sing well first before they explore instrumental music, and I will use the understanding of music as intellectual, moral, and physical disciplines as a basis for advocacy in my district.

An interesting discussion during this course was the discussion of philosophical positions.  The text stated that it is important for music educators to choose one of the stances and consistently adhere to the chosen stance.  I disagree that this is important; I believe that it is stronger for a music educator to have a full understanding of all of the stances and adopt the one that is, at that moment, most effective for the learning of the students.  I would be remiss if my choice of philosophy prevented my students from learning to the best of their abilities.  That being said, I believe that, generally speaking, the most effective philosophy according to my personality and teaching style is pragmatism.  With music, the process is undoubtedly more useful than the product, and students must learn to evaluate themselves and others in order to understand what is good.  After all, there cannot be an understanding of what is good without an understanding of what is bad.  It is important, especially in this constantly changing world of technological advancement, that students are educated for change.  Students must learn the process for learning music instead of worrying only about the product of performance, and students must learn how to transfer their knowledge into other areas of their lives by webbing the information together.  I will use this philosophy to adjust what I am teaching to the current needs of my students, and I will change my philosophy according to the changing needs of my students.  I will be sure to emphasize the steps that we take to learn our music more than the actual concert.  While the concert is in mind, the most important part of music class is the enjoyment of making the music.  I believe this will create lifelong music lovers and learners, which is my primary goal as a music teacher.

Another topic that was explored during this course was aesthetics.  Aesthetics are the understanding that living is not the same thing as existing.  While existing includes things like eating and breathing, living includes things that are satisfying, meaningful, and interesting.  Aesthetics allow humans to look beyond the simple and practical parts of life into the parts of life that make life matter.  Music is undoubtedly aesthetic, because it exists only to make life better and to express emotions and feelings.  Aesthetics are an important way to advocate for music education because music offers this emotional expression, creativity, and meaningful parts of life that other core subjects like math and science cannot. This, in itself, makes music more important to study: music is what makes us human.  These parts of life are very important for students to receive as part of their education, because I do not want to just train people to grow up into robots who can follow directions and copy whatever they are told.  I want to train people to become contributors to the world, to creatively think about new solutions to long-standing problems, and to express themselves and communicate well to others.  By using music listening assignments to create aesthetic experiences for my students, I will contribute not only to their intellect, but to their humanness.  I will teach my students to seek for deeper meaning in the things that they are learning, and to never settle for the surface level.

In chapter 4, the topic was the purposes of education and how music education fits in with general education.  There were 4 roles of education listed in the text.  The first was minimum competencies, which means that since parents have specializations in our advanced world, students cannot learn all of the basics that they need to know at home anymore.  The second was a cohesive society, which means that the multitude of cultures in America must be combined into a common culture so that all citizens can better understand one another.  The third was learning from the past, which outlines that we could not advance as a society without an understanding of what we've already learned, or else we would never be able to advance since we would spend our lives creating what someone else already created.  The fourth was a richer life, which acknowledges that being able to competently function as an educated adult citizen makes for a multifaceted and more meaningful life.  While I inherently knew that these were purposes of education, they had never been previously explicitly pointed out to me.  An understanding of the roles of education and their relationship to music education will help me to advocate for music in the future more cohesively.  Music helps students will all four of these purposes, but it especially relates to a cohesive society since we, as Americans, have our own styles of music that help us fit into our subcultures.  Music also especially relates to a richer life.  I do not expect my students to necessarily grow up to be professional musicians, but I do expect them to use music to make their lives better and to use an understanding of creative expression to communicate to others better as adults.

The next modules in the course were sociological and social psychological concepts in music education.  The textbook poignantly stated that music is a form of behavior, and I had never thought of it that way before.  Thinking of music as a behavior will certainly affect how I teach music.  Since music is a behavior, I expect my students to be actively involved in making music.  Most of the objectives that I will use in my music class will be behavioral objectives because I will want students to do things that are musical to show how they are learning music.  This behavior is also cultural.  Since many of my parents and students do not attend formal concerts, I will use time in music class to teach students about proper concert etiquette.  I will also take the time during concerts to briefly educated parents about appropriate behavior.  I believe this will add a higher level of culture to our community that will be meaningful to parents and children alike.  Since music is social psychological, it often relates to the group as a whole.  Teaching students to work together for the good of the whole group is a very important task to me.  I want to emphasize with my students that each voice that sings is an important part of our group's sound.  I want to help them understand that in our musical culture, we work as one unit even though we are individuals.  Music teaches us how to matter individually because of our contribution to others.  This is, by far, my greatest defense of music - the relationship of ourselves to others and learning how to fit within a group.  Group efforts will always be an important part of life, especially as adults in the workforce, and I want my students to gain an understanding of healthy communication and emotional expression while they are working within a group where they feel safe to be themselves.

Lastly, we discussed psychology in music education. While there were many parts in chapter 7 that were important to me, the most important was the discussion of Piaget's levels of development.  While I had learned about these developmental levels in several courses for my undergraduate degree and I have experienced the developmental levels in my students as they communicate to me, I have never read about the developmental levels' specific relationship to music.  The authors of the text cited Zimmerman, 1981 from a study that concluded that children can form musical concepts in a specific order: timbre, tempo, duration, pitch, and harmony.  I have never known this before.  In the future, I will arrange my kindergarten curriculum around these concepts in order to accommodate for my students' understanding.  Since the concepts build upon one another, this is a great starting point for building my curriculum, which is the topic of my Capstone Project.  I look forward to creating meaningful lesson plans in this order and studying how much better my students learn the necessary concepts.

In summary, the most important lesson that was reemphasized in this course is that it is important to continually consciously and cognitively think about where I stand on issues in music education.  To be a successful music educator, I must know and continue to develop my position on philosophy as an educator.  Without a governing philosophy, I cannot affectively instill concepts in my students to the degree which I would prefer.  Without knowledge of the history of music education, I cannot meet my students where they are and take them where they need to go in their music learning.  Without an understanding of sociology, social psychology, and psychology in music education, I would be unaware of the importance of music in students' lives and how to relate to their culture and needs.  In short, I would surely be a poor music educator if not for a good music education foundation.