November 30, 2006
Students share music with Toppenish kids
For many of the students in Patricia Campbell’s class, Music for Children, the trip to Toppenish loomed as a scary experience they weren’t sure they could succeed at. Most of these students, Campbell says, think the ideal post-graduation job would be teaching instrumental or vocal music in a suburban high school or middle school — certainly not teaching songs and rhythm activities to a bunch of squirmy elementary school kids in a community of majority Spanish-speaking Mexican-Americans, a place where the music specialist visits once a week for 30 minutes per class.
But the class’ visit to Valley View Elementary a month ago turned out to be a pleasant surprise in some cases. “It totally changed my mindset, going over there,” senior Ryan Brumbaugh says. “I didn’t think I could do it, but I wound up loving the elementary setting.”
The trip was part of a partnership, called “Music Alive! in the Yakima Valley,” that has taken the students back this week to Toppenish, a town at the edge of the Yakama Reservation. Campbell created the program, with some funding help from the School of Music, the Office of Minority Affairs and the College of Arts & Sciences. A UW graduate student in music visits the school regularly to augment the work of the school’s music specialist, and the undergraduates visit twice per quarter to add their energy to the mix.
The result, Campbell says, is benefits for both sides: The students get experience teaching younger children, most of them Mexican American, and the district gets additional music classes that it ordinarily couldn’t afford. Toppenish is a small and relatively poor school district where many students come from families of former migrant workers who live on the Indian reservation.
“A good number of our students come out of rock-solid K-12 music programs,” Campbell says. “Their vision for themselves is that they’ll go back to the kind of communities they’ve left, where they’re well equipped and well supported and there’s an understanding of the importance of music programs. So this experience opens their ears and their eyes to other contexts, other needs, other community possibilities.”
Amanda Soto, the graduate student who is working with Valley View, says the school and indeed the whole Toppenish school district has been quite supportive of the partnership effort. The music specialist, she says, has welcomed her presence and the district superintendent came to the school on the day the undergraduates visited to rave about the importance of music and the arts in the lives of children.
It wasn’t just a social visit, of course. The students had been working in the Music for Children class to prepare lesson plans for the Valley View classes they’d be in. Working in three-person teams, they planned songs, rhythmic activities and musical games. Then each team presented in two classrooms with different age groups.
Senior Haley Franzwa explains how working with the first-graders involved singing and doing sound effects for the song, She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain, as well as walking in a circle and keeping the beat. For the fifth-graders, the song was Bow Down, Belinda, and involved changing the action for every verse. “The kids could suggest new actions for us to do,” she said.
Franzwa says the immediacy of the kids’ response was heartening. “At first the fifth-graders weren’t participating, but after a half hour they were singing loudly and really getting into it,” she says. And Brumbaugh adds that the visible reaction — so different from the feigned indifference of older students — was an unexpected delight.
There’s also room on the schedule for a concert. The Toppenish kids sing songs they’ve learned and the UW students sing or play instruments. The UW students get a further cultural immersion by spending several nights with Toppenish families.
Soto, a Mexican American who is originally from South Texas, finds the environment in Toppenish familiar. She’s introduced some traditional Mexican songs into the curriculum and says it was fun to see the students react. “They already knew many of them,” she says. “They love those songs.”
But in other ways the experience has been something new for Soto. “Doing the teaching really opened me up to some new possibilities, because up to now I was focused on instrumental music,” she says. “Now I’m very interested in how music can be used in the regular classroom. I’ve talked to the teachers about what’s going on, asking if we can work together.”
That’s essential, Campbell says, because schools like Valley View heavily emphasize preparing for the WASL. “We want to make them aware how music can be used as a tool for teaching reading, language arts and vocabulary,” she says. “We’re working toward including math too.”
With the quarter ending, this week marks the final visit the undergraduate students will make to Toppenish. But Soto will be continuing her work there next quarter, and a new group of undergraduates will teach and perform music of the world’s cultures as part of their course, Ethnomusicology in the Schools.
The current class has already gotten something valuable from the exercise. “It was great to see that we could take what we learned in class and apply it to a new situation,” Franzwa says. “It made us feel that we really are prepared to teach.”
