Posts tagged composition

One of the reasons why I missed Twitter so much during Lent was because I knew that #musedchat was taking place on Monday nights at 8pm EST. Now that I’m done (mostly) with the scheduling craziness that has defined this semester, I finally got the chance to participate in #musedchat last night. 

Here is the transcript from the chat (I’m @justine_robin). Discussion centered around ideas of curriculum in the music classroom and what was important to focus on. I thought it was a really good way to get to know people who have different ideas about music education as compared to the friends and professors I have met and worked with through my program at Teachers College. The chat is also a great way to hear from current teachers’ experiences in the field.

One downside of the chat is that it takes place on Twitter, and as we all know, there’s a character limit. This kind of makes it difficult to express your opinions on topics that can be quite complex, especially when you’re tagging every post with ‘#musedchat’; there’s 10 characters already wasted! I said some things last night, especially regarding listening activities/assignments, that I really would have wanted to expand on. Also, if you’re not running a #musedchat search and only just going off of the people you’re already following, it’s definitely easy to miss some replies. Finally, I felt bad for the non-mused people who have me added and who were probably really irritated with me last night from 8-9pm. They probably really didn’t care so much about my updates.

That said, I really enjoyed the experience and am looking forward to writing a guest blog at musicedmajor.net thanks to @zweibz7’s suggestion. While, as I said above, it’s nice to talk to others who don’t share my educational background and/or philosophies (and discourse is one of the best ways to ensure that you really have a grasp on the knowledge you’re trying to share with others), I realized for the first time during the chat how much I’ve really been impacted by TC’s focus on creativity, composition, and comprehensive musicianship (should I just start calling them the three Cs?). I plan on centering my guest blog around the issue of the creative process in the music classroom and some ideas regarding how to further incorporate it into the curriculum as a way to make aural skills, music history & theory, and the repertoire itself really come alive for the students. I’m experiencing this process right now in some of my classes and I’m really excited to begin implementing it with students in the fall.