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Posts tagged ‘lessons’

Sep 5

Talking Pedagogy: Stringbabies with Kay Tucker

Over the summer I had the pleasure of inviting Kay Tucker, creator of the Stringbabies teaching method to record a couple of conversations with me. I had sent her a few questions in advance and promptly went off script. This will be of interest to anyone who would like to know a bit of the methodology behind Stringbabies. These videos are not meant to be introductions to the method or any sort of sales pitch. I am interested in pedagogy and in these talks, I extract the underlying principles and begin to discuss how they are relevant to teachers and learners of music across the scope of learning – from beginners to the very advanced.

Together the videos take just under an hour to watch. Get the popcorn, boil the kettle, and pull up a chair.

Many thanks to Kay for taking the time to talk with me. I thoroughly enjoyed our time together.

Sep 9

Time to open #MUS654 for 2017

It’s the start of another academic year, and I have just welcomed a new group of wonderful final year students to my undergraduate class on repertoire for the young performer. It’s a great one, in that we are so diverse, from classical to folk to rock and yet all on a common path of figuring out how to create a year-long curriculum for a learner. One of the first things I tell people is that I am not in a position to tell them how to ‘do’ their instruments. I can advise and guide on how to learn and devise learning. Time to open our minds! (featured image CC BY-SA by Eddie van W.)

We have more in common than we think – even with this year’s group spanning ukulele, clarinet, electric bass, voice, and violin. With all my classes we have no textbooks, and I strive to gather as many resources as possible for the students. For some classes these are paywalled, and fortunately we have access. For this class, there are many great resources that serve our purposes that are freely available. Over the past few years I have developed an open educational resource that is the closest thing to a text book that we have. It is here as the #MUS654 pages. There is a drop down menu for the pages, and I’m going to keep a grid of all the posts I make this year on a page there.

The idea was born out of two things:

  1. I can’t tell everyone what to do (I really could not pretend to have the expertise in ALL the instruments- that would be beyond pretentious)
  2. The people who can advise are out there, and so I thought wouldn’t it be great if my students worked to engage with you all, and in turn you were all invited to join in as well! (yay!)

What I had devised was like a mooc, but it isn’t a class that people need to register for. It is more of a cMOOC (that’s where everyone connects up and they devise the content). I didn’t realise it when I started this class in 2014, but that’s what I was creating. In this project/#MUS654, we discuss the commonalities of music, planning, engagement, but you have to do the heavy work and make the content for a curriculum (if you want). Otherwise you could just dip in and out and join in with anything that takes your fancy.

Learning to reach our and network is more than half of the game for musicians today.

So if you are a player, performer, enthusiast, teacher, learner, or just fancy yourself as a person who enjoys a bit of music – you are warmly invited to join in with any or all of the goings on here. Those studying with me at the University of Chichester will be following along with the content from now until the beginning of December, and I’ll announce the weeks with a blog post and share it as widely as I can. Feel free to look at Session 1: The Mechanics of Sound and see what you think…

You can participate by:

  • Tweeting (in your own account, or feel free to make a fake account just for this if you prefer to remain detached from your normal profile)
  • Blogging
  • Commenting on the main pages and posts here, on this website

You are in control of how publicly or privately you post.

I encourage you to tag things with #MUS654 and I’ll be searching! If I’m clever, this year I’ll figure out how to aggregate blogs! (these technical things hurt my brain sometimes 😉 )

 

I look forward to having you share the musical journey with us! We can learn a lot from one another.

Here’s to #MUS654 2017

Laura

Image CC By by Sharon Mollerus

May 1

Respectfully yours… from the parents

Last week we heard from the parents in our #IVTchat and it was certainly interesting. I’m not going to soliloquise about it here. The good thing was that it made us think and we had a full discussion afterwards. I sometimes feel my head spin as I could (and did) contribute as teacher, parent, and learner. All I will say here is that life is a complicated cocktail, and with the right ingredients it can be completely magic. Just being aware that there is always more to the picture than we can see is a first step – and understanding that the impact of a teacher can be so very valuable – either to instigate and then reinforce the positive support from home, or to be a source of support where there is less to be found outside the lesson. There was so much to think about! It made us reflect on our own experience and perhaps look at the wider picture of lessons in a slightly different way. Read more

Apr 27

IVTChat 2 Hey Daddy-O! (Talking to parents)

If anyone is joining us for the first time, this session is part of the Connecting Classes project and it is designed to augment conversations between students, and across the wider profession and community. For this reason, you should all feel most welcome to join in! Read more

Apr 24

4 Comments

#IVTchat More than Notes

This week my class did their first official Twitter ‘listen-n-chat’ and it was great fun! It’s funny how using technology for a purpose can be sort of like having roadworks – it is there to improve the situation, but if you aren’t aware of it and don’t navigate it carefully, you can get stuck in traffic instead of flowing smoothly to your destination. Fortunately my group work very well together and we were able to navigate things and to come out with an enjoyable and productive outcome. Read more