May 10, 2007
Music Education: Reason to be proud
There’s understandable pride in the Music Education Program at the UW School of Music these days, where an alumna was recently named National Teacher of the Year. It’s the teacher’s award, of course, but it reflects well on the program from which she graduated, a program that one faculty member calls “unique in all the world.”
Two other coming events, as well as ongoing research, also show the program in an excellent light. One event is the celebration on May 17 of another Music Education alumnus, Marcus Tsutakawa, Garfield High School’s well-loved orchestra director, as one of four distinguished alumni of the UW College of Arts & Sciences. The other is the fall publication of Musician and Teacher, a music education textbook written by Professor Patricia Shehan Campbell, with assistance from associate professors Steven Morrison and Steven Demorest, current chair of the program. It’s actually one of three books Campbell has under way.
But back to the National Teacher of the Year award. It came from the national Council of Chief State School Officers, which named Andrea Peterson, a 1996 UW Music Education graduate and music teacher at Monte Cristo Elementary in the small Washington community of Granite Falls. She was chosen from among all those who won similar honors at the statewide level, and was only the second music teacher so honored in the national award’s 57-year history.
Proud department faculty and staff recognize, as does the award, Peterson’s skill and creativity in creating and maintaining a music program from virtually nothing. But they also know that the background she gained at the UW — she earned degrees in vocal and instrumental music and in music education — prepared her well for the challenge.
“The primary mission of our undergraduate program is to prepare people to be teachers of music in Washington public schools,” said Demorest, adding that the program has the only undergraduate teaching certificate now offered at the UW. Bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in music education are available, along with an “all-level” K-12 teaching certification, with endorsements in choral, instrumental and general music instruction. Each year, on average, the program awards about 30 undergraduate degrees and about a half-dozen master’s and doctoral degrees.
The students in music education tend to be musicians who want to teach, rather than teachers wanting to learn music, and they must pass auditions like any School of Music student.
“What we have found is that if students are getting the pedagogical training while getting music training, they begin to think like teachers sooner,” Demorest said.
Music instruction at the UW dates back almost as far as the institution itself, with roots well into the nineteenth century. But though the documentation is unclear, coursework in music education seems to have begun about 1910 or 1911, when a course called Public School Music was first offered for students heading toward teaching careers.
The idea is not to teach music to be an afterthought in the public schools, but a main educational component, Demorest said. “We emphasize to our students that music needs to become an integral part of the schools, and integrated into the whole education of the child.” He said Andrea Peterson “is a great example of that.”
Campbell, who teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in music education, said she was drawn to the program in part because of its potential to open student minds to ethnomusicology and the teaching of world music in the schools, which she said has become an ongoing theme in the program.
This moves from theory to practice in the program’s strong outreach programs, which include a project designed by Campbell called Music Alive in the Yakima Valley. In this program, UW music majors visit schools on the Yakama Indian Nation Reservation, to both perform for the students — the children and grandchildren of migrant workers — and get them making music, too. It’s a culturally reciprocal experience, Campbell said, with students “gaining as they give” and often coming back with inspirations to use in their own future classrooms. (See the UWeek story on this program at http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?Search=%22music+alive%22&articleid=28537.)
Another outreach program is in partnership with Laurelhurst Elementary, a nearby public school. After budget tightening caused the school to eliminate its art and music program in the early 1990s, the Laurelhurst Parent-Teacher Association raised enough money to support the ongoing position of a UW teaching assistant as a part-time music teacher for the school. The outreach program also incorporates a 400-level course called Music for Children, taught by Campbell, that brings undergraduate music education students to the school for real-life teaching interaction with the students, thereby benefiting both groups.
In the research arena, Morrison explained, music education faculty have teamed with colleagues at the Integrated Brain Imaging Center in the Department of Radiology to investigate the neuroscientific side of music — how people learn. “It’s a bit about the nature of difference and diversity in music,” he said. “One of the wonderful aspects of the program is that students are constantly encountering different kinds of music. We’re trying to learn about the processes by which people interact with and learn about this music — cognitively, what kinds of changes a person experiences through extended interaction with new types of music.”
Morrison, the faculty specialist in instrumental music education, said the program’s structure “somewhat looks like music in the schools … the classroom component, the vocal component and the instrumental component.” More and more, however, students are interested in multiple experiences and pathways, which the program is able to offer. “Personally, I enjoy working with students who are eager for as many different kinds of musical experience as possible,” Morrison said. “We have very bright students, and they see how learning in one context relates to learning in another context, and they are able to apply those principles in different settings.” He said, “I tell them, the more different things they can do well, the more options are available to them.”
Music Education students, of whom faculty say Teacher of the Year Andrea Peterson is a fine example, graduate with more than just theory, performance or pedagogy alone, but also with the inspiration and ability to help music take hold and come alive in the school setting.
“We prepare our students for the importance of community-building in their schools, and engagement beyond the classroom in schools — to engage the lives of kids,” said Demorest.
Clearly, the three faculty are pretty engaged, too, and excited about their work. Campbell said of UW Music Education, “It’s unique in all the world — it marries education with performance studies and a heavy emphasis on American vernacular music, especially jazz.” An emphasis on world music too, influenced by faculty backgrounds in ethnomusicology, also enables students to open up the music, and thus the minds, of different cultures.
“There is pride in knowing that students come in and that, while they certainly are not empty vessels, we help to provide a pathway toward a kind of giving back, as they do to schools, to youth, and to community,” Campbell said. “It’s a point of pride to be able to be a part of that.”
