Mme Jennifer's Music Class
Our indoor music activities
(check out "Music Outside" for when music and the arts go outdoors)
(check out "Music Outside" for when music and the arts go outdoors)
Every year, students in Grade 5 attend the Adventures in Music Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra Concert. It is not simply an outing without pedagogical purpose. Indeed, funding from the school division or school would likely not be able to be acquired for an event with no educational reasoning. Short answer:
One of the most exciting reasons is that 25+ members of each of the Grade 5 classes will be performing on stage with the symphony, and it will be wonderful to have all their classmates and teachers cheering them on from the audience. It is truly incredible that the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has hundreds of students perform with them every year, as well as tens of thousands of students who get to see these concerts that are designed specifically for students. At its core is having an experience as a school community and celebrating their learning that takes place leading up to, and in attending the concert. Before the concert takes place, students learn about some pieces in the concert and their educational connections in music class. Most certainly, the answer is that it meets several curricular outcomes that students are expected to learn during the Grade 5 school year. The outcomes are not just from music, but also from social studies, from the Global Competencies, indigenous learning from the land and more. Land based learning, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals are a part of the Louis Riel School Division’s Multi Year Strategic Plan, so it is very important that Grade 5 students are involved with this learning, and learning this through music does this in a deep and meaningful way, as will be explained below. These areas are of huge importance to École St. Germain, with our connection to Learning for a Sustainable Future as a Sustainable Future School. Social Studies The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra concert for 2024 has the environment as its theme. “This adventure through time begins at the Centennial Concert Hall in April, 2024, where students will quickly find themselves whisked through musical time, exploring orchestral music by many of the great symphonic composers through time and from across the globe. Students will learn through music how we can be good stewards and take better care of this planet we call home.” In the Manitoba Social Studies Curriculum, Environmental Citizenship is a core value. “Citizenship is the core concept that provides the learning focus for social studies at all grades. To identify the knowledge, values, and skills that students will need as active democratic citizens, social studies must take into account the society in which students live and anticipate the challenges they will face in the future…. Citizenship education is fundamental to living in a democratic society. The concept of citizenship takes on meaning in specific contexts and is determined by time and place.” About Environmental Citizenship, the Social Studies Curriculum specifically says: “Underlying both national and global realities, and the responsibilities they impose on citizens, is the increasing fragility of our natural environment. Quality of life depends upon the sustainability of our environment. This places a particularly important responsibility on citizens, who must ultimately balance the demands of economic growth and high living standards against respect for the environment and the needs of future generations.” Another element that is important in Social Studies is “Active Learning”: “Active learning is encouraged through resource-based and experiential learning. These include on-the-land experiences, field studies, guided tours, and participation in diverse cultural activities. Social studies teaching offers the ideal opportunity to integrate literature and the arts, and to use information and communication technologies.” Specifically, with Grade 5 Social Studies, students learn about indigenous peoples and knowledge: “Value oral tradition as an important source of knowledge about First Peoples.” “Locate on a map of North America the traditional territories of First Peoples.” “Describe practices and beliefs that reflected First Peoples’ connections with the land and the natural environment.” Indigenous Learning from/on the Land: As an example, with this symphony concert and its preparations, students have learned teachings from Cree star expert Wilfred Buck from Opaskwayak Cree Nation about indigenous constellations and stories, and related them to Cree composer, Andrew Balfour’s piece celebrating the North Star, Kiwetin Acahkos. This meets the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Learning on Land. As another example, they will also learn about local songwriter Daniel Lavoie’s perspective of the importance of water and food security in our province, and the world, through his piece ‘C’est la Terre’. Water is life. Scientists who study the changes happening to our planet are realizing that their message needs to be shared with those outside of the scientific community, which will require diverse types of media and text. It also requires being shared in a way that accesses emotions, which music does. Composer and scientist Emily Thoroski has just finished her fascinating thesis (I, Mme Jennifer Engbrecht, just recently read it, as she will be working with several classes in our school) on the importance of music to share the need to help the environment. Music and the arts accomplish rich learning and meaningful connections to important issues such as caring for our planet. Music: Turning to the Manitoba Music Curriculum for more information on the importance of learning about our world through music, it tells us: “Arts education, including music education, is important for preserving and nurturing human culture and heritage and necessary for human health and social well-being. Human health and social well-being and a sustainable environment and economy are essential and integrated components of an equitable quality of life and a sustainable future for all Canadians. Education for a Sustainable Future highlights community and culture, the economic viability of arts and cultural enterprises, and the preservation of heritage and culture as crucial sustainability issues and concepts.” About integration of the various curricula mentioned above for the purpose of learning about the environment, land based learning through music, the Manitoba Music Curriculum says: “Curriculum integration reinforces meaningful connections within and across disciplines. The arts enrich and are enriched by each other and other subject areas by affording new and deeper insights and a greater range of possibilities for communicating experience and meaning. When true integration occurs, no individual subject area is used solely to support learning in other subjects. Educators are encouraged to integrate arts learnings with other subject areas where meaningful and appropriate, while maintaining focus on learner achievement of the arts learnings.” Curriculum integration has been the hallmark of my teaching career. I have used music to deepen understanding of various areas of science, social studies, math curricula and more so that students learn about the interconnectedness of various themes. The project below had them working with a composer, and integrated science, ELA, social studies and Education for Sustainable Development... From the Manitoba Music Curriculum: “Music enriches a vibrant culture and is integral to human life. It has the power to illuminate, deepen, broaden, and enhance human experience. Music and musicians have an impact on daily experience, help define and express individual and collective identities, and shape, reflect, and comment upon societal and cultural values. Music is a multimodal, cross-cultural literacy and expressive art form. The ways of knowing through music include cognitive, physical, affective, intuitive, and spiritual modes. Music embodies and expresses ideas, feelings, and meaning. It communicates within and across cultural, societal, historical, and even prehistorical contexts. Throughout history, music has played a significant role in human life, cultivating, recording, and passing on culture, and affecting and influencing society. Music is vital to human life; no culture in the world exists without music. Music contributes to personal, social, economic, cultural, and civic aspects of people’s lives in cultures around the world… Music is a vital part of every learner’s education and contributes to deep and enduring learner engagement that leads to learning success. Music education develops unique, powerful, and multiple ways of perceiving, interpreting, knowing, representing, and communicating understandings about one’s self and the world. Through music experiences, learners have opportunities to think creatively, explore ideas and feelings, and develop emerging personal, cultural, and social identities.” All the music learnings below are involved with the preparation learning for attending the symphony concert, and the symphony concert itself: Music is also very important for the Global Competencies: “Manitoba defines global competencies as complex ways of knowing, being, doing, and becoming that are multi-faceted, interdependent, transdisciplinary, and developed over time. The learner accesses their ways of knowing, being, doing, and becoming to engage effectively and with purpose within a context. They provide learners with the ability to meet “shifting and ongoing demands of life, work and learning; to be active and responsive in their communities; to understand diverse perspectives; and to act on issues of global significance.” (CMEC) Global competencies are interdependent, interconnected, expandable, and extendable. They guide the implementation of curricula, providing a common focus and language across disciplines and programs and giving a rich, holistic purpose for learning and teaching.” Every one of the competencies mentioned above are deeply activated in the music classroom, culminating with attending the symphony concert as a final representation of all that they have learned.
After the concert, students will write a reflection about what they learned from the concert itself, as the concert will have provided even more learning than what took place in the music room. If they were not present they will interview another student to learn what it was like. The power of a live performance with hundreds of musicians is one to be experienced and remembered.
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Here are examples of what students are doing in each grade that they can share with their families. Click on the picture that corresponds with the grade of your student. Kindergarten: Grade 2: Grade 3 and 4: Grade 5: I love our Manitoba Music Curriculum. I am thrilled and honoured to have been invited to demonstrate to music teachers in Manitoba how it works, with 5 different music lessons, by the Government of Manitoba, Education Department. Click on the image to see these student projects: As can be seen with the above links, what one sees in a music class today, based on the intent of the Manitoba Music Curriculum, is much more emphasis on interconnecting various concepts that go beyond simply playing a specific rhythm, reading notes on a staff line, or learning to play an instrument. The essence of this curriculum is to provide context to the instrument playing, bringing in all the ideas of where music comes from, what it's for, why is it created; to create a more global understanding of the place of music and the arts in our world, and why it is so important. Because of this honour of being invited to create these lessons, and because I have continued since that time to work closely with the Arts Department of Manitoba Education and the University of Manitoba Curriculum and Instruction, I feel quite confident that my interpretation of what is being asked of me as a music specialist, and how to execute that interpretation is exactly what is envisioned for our Manitoba music classrooms for our current times. You can click on the butterfly below to see the 4 wings, all the outcomes, and how they work together. There is now a second edition, with small but important changes that I love, but this link below is so interactive to really grasp how it works: Here is a word cloud that I created which can give an impression of the important ideas in this curriculum: This curriculum is on the image of a butterfly, to show 4 different areas, or wings, of importance: "The Wings Working Together As one looks from the centre of the music butterfly to the wings, a new set of relationships emerge. Each wing represents one of the essential learning areas into which the general and specific music learning outcomes are organized. While the body of the butterfly evokes a holistic view of the student as a young music maker, the wings articulate a range of learning outcomes that collectively support a path to comprehensive, balanced, and developmentally appropriate learning in music. The essential learning areas are
The Wings Individually The organization of learning outcomes into distinct, interrelated learning areas, or wings, is intended to give a clear outline of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students are expected to demonstrate at various grades. Each of the four essential learning areas contains the following components:
Our music class is the general music area, which uses the Orff approach to music education, which I will write about in a bit, below. We will now look at the centre of the butterfly, to see how all these wings work together: The Centre of the Music Butterfly The words Making Music appear at the centre of the music butterfly to emphasize the following ideas:
The 2nd Edition speaks much more of meaning making, transformational learning etc, which comes from new experiences, discussions, reflections etc. Again, very different than the 1970s version that I grew up with of "it's music class, so let's sing 5 songs" with no explanation of the songs, how they were created, how to extend that learning, the context of the song/the creators and why the songs were written etc etc.. "The Learning Process Learning is an active, embodied, and social process of constructing meaning. It is shaped by the dynamic interaction of learners’ prior knowledge and new experiences. Learners construct unique understandings in many different ways, depending on their interests, experiences, and learning styles, and on personal, social, and cultural factors. Learners are motivated to become engaged learners when learning has personal and relevant meaning for them and when they have opportunities to reflect on and guide their own learning. In the school environment, learning occurs simultaneously across and between multiple nested levels that include individual and collective learners, educators, and schools, curriculum structures, artistic and cultural communities, and disciplinary knowledge (Davis and Sumara 91). Individual, personal knowing is enfolded in and unfolded from collective knowing and activity (Davis and Sumara 65). See the illustration on the following page. Et cetera. Go read the whole beginning, it's excellent. Regarding the K-8 General Music program. It is important to understand that, while playing instruments is definitely part of general music class, it is about everything to do with music: listening, creating, responding, appreciation.... I went through the MB curriculum learning outcomes (now called recursive learnings in the 2nd edition) and determined that only about 10 of them directly name playing instruments or singing... and of those, it's more specifically 2 of them. So that is somewhere between 3%-16% of music learning in the general music classroom is based on just playing the instruments directly. Were a student to want to deeply learn a specific instrument beyond the general music classroom, they are invited to consider taking lessons on an instrument of their choice, to focus on that instrument. Many families have come to see me over the years to ask how to go about finding instrument lessons such as piano, guitar, etc. That being said, we do play instruments almost every class. However, as I'm explaining, it isn't about just running in and playing an instrument without any context, or that would not be music learning. It needs to be done with purpose, context, and intent. And purpose, context, and intent need to be transparent and explicit so that students develop as music learners. How we do this in my music classroom, and mostly every music classroom throughout Manitoba, Canada, and - arguably - the world, is through the Orff approach to music education. As the Carl Orff Canada website states: The Orff philosophy combines the elements of speech, rhythm, movement, dance, and song. And at the heart of all this is improvisation – the instinct children have to create their own melodies, to explore their imaginations. Elemental music is never only music but an integration of movement, dance and language. It is music one creates oneself in which one is involved not as a listener, but as a participant. The Orff approach has elements of rhythmic speech, movement, singing, playing instruments, and listening. 1. Rhythmic speech is used to learn rhythms. Rhythmic speech to learn rhythms can be seen in so many cultures to help learn rhythms: 2. Movement: Responding to musical works, or concepts, with movement is a huge part of understanding how music functions. The movement, the response, being part of the music is, arguably the essence of music itself, as we are embodying the feeling of what we are hearing. Students can demonstrate their understanding of a musical work through moving to it. Children are hugely kinesthetic learners, so using one's body to represent simple concepts like fast, slow, high, low, or more elaborate concepts such as those represented in musical works, is the beginning of being able to play with power, with emotion, with intuition, with nuance This movement performance below is from the San Francisco School Orff Ensemble, who presented at the AOSA Conference in 2015: Here is a performance out of Arizona State Orff Level 3. Try listening without the sound, and then add the sound... their movement response very much matches the music that is being played. In fact, if I were to just play the movement response for students in class, I could ask them to create their own music to match that performance, and I bet there would be the same essence/feeling. That would actually be a great music lesson! To see the importance of movement to a stellar performance, one can watch the recorder performance below. There is no music without movement. Music performers have that movement embedded inside them, and that free flow comes out in their performances: 1.9 million views. What puts this performance over the top is the level to which Maurice Steger embodies this piece. The music is alive. A quote I have up in my room is "Don`t play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes." Playing the meaning of the notes comes from all the great content of the Manitoba Music Curriculum, about context, about transformative learning, about meaning making, and from the brilliant Orff approach that brings children's natural desire to move, to be curious and creative, to all that music means... beyond the instruments. Music itself. 3. Singing - Students use singing to learn many concepts, musical works etc. Here we can see singers demonstrating the 'canon' music form. So it isn't just about the singing. It's about learning that there are musical forms, music from different cultures, following the cues of a director, music appreciation, behaviour of a performer, and so many other concepts: 4. Playing Instruments: With the Orff approach, and in the 'general music classroom', one uses instruments to learn concepts. It is mostly about the music concepts, to develop a global understanding of music and its place in the world. So we use instruments to expand on all the other elements of a general music education. Instruments are just one of many ways to learn these concepts. In the below performance, students are playing instruments. But the understandings that they are demonstrating are the concepts of: behaviour as a performer, following non-verbal cues, following the cues of a conductor, canon form introduction, meter, canon, various rhythms, texture, timbre, posture, technique, polyphony, coda, and likely more: It is very evidently a final performance where all of those concepts can be seen. However, in each music class, to build to what you see above, all those concepts have to be taught first, to provide context, meaning, skill, etc to their learning. This is the end result of all of that learning. But to occur at this level, make no mistake, all of the above concepts are needed to be taught and understood, or the playing you see would not be of this level. 5. Listening: This has a few meanings. The first can be that students are listening to many examples of musical works, for analysis, for examples of best practice, for learning concepts such as form, musical expression. The list goes on. In this example below, students are demonstrating their understanding of Kodàly's Viennese Musical Clock. This involves listening to it, first, to see how the form works. It is in rondo form, so they would need to learn about that (ABACADA...), listen intently for the A section, decide the musical expression represented in each section, and use a movement response that closely matches the sections to demonstrate the feel of the piece. Again, all of this is to develop one's inner musicality, which can be done through instruments, singing or movement. Sometimes, listening is used to listen to performances, to have examples of others, to help make decisions about how the class will play the piece. These are music outcomes that are expected to be addressed, as it is important: - explore and collect a variety of resources (e.g., motifs, riffs, music and music excerpts, technical challenges from existing repertoire, music and music excerpts, movement, images, sound, stories, poetry, artifacts, technology, multimedia) as a starting point for music creation and to ignite ideas for music creation. - compare music experienced from different times, places, social groups, and cultures. - identify, share, and discuss examples of music experienced through live performances and through various media. - demonstrate an awareness of the contributions of a variety of composers and musicians from own community, Manitoba, Canada, and various global contexts. - describe and compare qualities of different art forms (e.g., dance, dramatic arts, literary arts, music, visual arts) within similar social, cultural, or historical groups. - demonstrate an awareness of the intended meanings and/or purposes of music encountered in own performance and listening experiences. - demonstrate an appreciation of music as a means of experiencing the world and understanding the perspectives of others. - demonstrate behaviours and attitudes appropriate for performers and audience members in a variety of music settings and contexts. This one is one of the most important additions to the 2nd edition of the Manitoba Music Curriculum: - take time to perceive music experiences before sharing opinions and making judgments. - express first impression of own and others’ music (e.g., thoughts, feelings, intuition, associations, questions, experiences, memories, stories, connections to other disciplines). - discern details and listen for music elements (e.g., melody, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, pitch, timbre, harmony, texture). - recognize different noticings and build common understanding about music. - analyze how music elements are related, organized, and used to communicate meaning. - share and justify interpretations of own and others’ music. - examine others’ interpretations to understand diverse perspectives and inform new thinking about music. - co-construct criteria to critically analyze and evaluate music works, performances, and experiences. - justify own preferences, ideas, interpretations, decisions, and evaluations about music. - recognize and respect that individuals and groups may have different preferences, ideas, interpretations, opinions, and evaluations about music. So as we can see, listening to musical works is huge in the general music room, and in any music room where one is working towards understanding the meanings and purposes of music, as well as analyzing playing technique, form, cultural context etc. All of this moves towards developing someone who is educated about music for the purposes of attending performances, or performing ones' self, throughout the rest of their life. When performers consider playing a piece, they clearly listen to it, analyze it, and develop ideas for how to play it: Clearly an excellent cellist, who has taken the time to decide how to portray the character of The Swan, by Camille St. Saëns. This is a reason why drama is integrated into music class, to truly develop a sense of being the music, playing the role of what the music is trying to tell us, as Nathan Chan does here. Listening to music is a huge part of connecting to our local Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, for all grade levels. 35,000 students from around Manitoba attend concerts, or musicians attend their schools so that students can engage in music listening, and see performances. Because of this, the WSO provides lessons created by music teachers, such as myself, to enhance listening to musical works through movement, playing, singing, etc. I am honoured to have created several lessons for the WSO that have involved drama, dance, composing, instruments, etc. All have been enriching experiences that have led to working directly with composers, performing on stage with the WSO, and sharing performances through lesson creation. Click on the images below to see: So the Manitoba music classroom, ie Mme Jennifer's music classroom, has numerous elements of pedagogy at play, all with the overarching goal of developing students with a rich knowledge of the purpose of music in our society, and opportunities for playing and performance, based on the skills they learn. From the Music curriculum: As increasingly capable and passionate music makers, learners journey toward becoming creative, musically literate adults and citizens who will truly enrich their own lives and the lives of their future communities. |
Jennifer EngbrechtMusic Teacher in Manitoba, Canada. |