The case for expectation-free, exploratory music learning – Alt Ed Austin



Grace Thompson is a voice and piano teacher based in Austin. She is a classically trained soprano who graduated from Kennesaw State University in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in music–ethnomusicology. A longtime advocate for the neurodiverse community, Grace joins us on the blog to discuss her nontraditional methods of teaching music to kids through the Groove Garden program at Eastside Music School.

Musicking: (v.) any activity that includes playing, performing, listening, writing,
recording, or sharing music.

Childhood music lessons. We’ve all been there before, or maybe you haven’t. A parent has signed you up for a music lesson—piano, guitar, violin, or maybe even singing—and you’re getting ready to demonstrate to your teacher what you were meant to have practiced in the time since your last lesson.

Only you haven’t practiced or didn’t get as much practice time as you wanted. Teachers always can tell when a student hasn’t practiced, and you know walking in that your teacher will pick up on your lack of practice. Does this make me a bad student? A bad musician? Will my teacher be mad at me? Or disappointed? Will I ever learn to play this instrument?

As you go to play your instrument, these fears and anxieties course through your still-developing brain and begin to distract you and tell you that you’re not good enough. Playing your instrument has now turned from a fun hobby after school to an insurmountable test. The traditional private music lesson environment can, unfortunately, breed these sentiments in students, eventually turning students off from music as a whole.

Now imagine yourself as an atypical learner. Traditional learning environments are already not geared toward you, and now there is compounded stress from not being able to meet the expectations set by your teacher. These expectations have been set from a hegemonic system of learning music that is centuries old. This system of learning does not reflect the modern learner and is, in part, creating more failures than successes.

As a music teacher, I define success as a student being happily engaged in their studies, followed by an improvement in their technical and theoretical abilities. To support this type of musical education, the environment must be conducive to every learner, and we can create these environments by leading exploratory-driven, expectation-free music classrooms.



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