Creative Collaboration in Teaching

Marcelo Giglio

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137545978
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teacher Training

Creative Collaboration in Teaching focuses on the question of how best to facilitate creative collaboration among students in the classroom setting—with a focus on music composition and from the perspective of social-cultural psychology. This book is comprehensive, cutting-edge and scholarly in its approach. Marcelo Giglio's attention to music and creativity is detailed enough to satisfy any researcher, educator or teacher educator; but at the same time, his research approach, classroom observations and overriding recommendations can be easily applied to a wide range of subject areas. Giglio combines a rigorous review of the relevant literatures on creativity and social interactions with the reporting and analysis of his own original data across the world, and then goes on to support this important work with detailed descriptions of classroom episodes—student-to-student and teacher-to-student interactions. By combining these three elements, this book offers socio-creative and pedagogical models for education in practice as well as teacher education and research.

Part I – First Movement

Music, Creativity, Collaboration, and Reflection in the Classroom

I begin with some of the aspects that shaped the design, implementation, observation, and modifications of the creative activity at the centre of the flexible pedagogical sequences for music education. The first aspect described is the way in which humans organize sounds starting with primitive music, and passing through everyday phenomena and traditional forms up to contemporary music. Afterwards, I deal with the different ways of creating music in front of an audience and how to make that audience a participant in that creation. Then I analyse the impact that trends, reality television, youth culture, and technology can have on adolescents. Additionally, I detail music-creation experiences implemented in schools, in playful activities, and, finally, in activities designed to educate teachers. Situated in the context of educational reform, these activities reveal the origins of this work’s main idea: that one can design and observe flexible pedagogical sequences in order to foster creative learning and collaboration amongst children and, consequently, understand the role that teachers should adopt concerning the creative productions of their students.

1

Music, or the Organization of Sound

1. Creating, performing, and listening to music

Creating, performing, and listening to music are human activities that can be carried out in different ways. Consequently, music education requires an approach that allows performers to express themselves with sound in different ways according to the moment and their desires.

Throughout my teaching experiences,¹ I have observed that during music lessons, one should encourage and reserve an important space for students to make original music. Imitating, reading, memorizing, and rehearsing musical pieces are not enough for the student to learn the contents of the curriculum. It is not enough to teach music theory and sol-fa without hearing, analysing, and creating based on what has been taught. Turning to creative musical productions based on what students can create and express has also proven enriching and educational during my own music lessons, especially when these productions are the result of activity that unites “creating”, “performing”, and “listening” to music.

When students compose music, they need to explore certain sound parameters in a concrete way. They cannot produce without first having discussed, tried, practised, and played the sounds that they themselves generate and organize. In this way, the technical and aesthetic elements (such as the combinations of timbre and the organization of highs, durations, and intensities) can form part of the content of their discussions and the exploratory experiments that they undertake in order to collaborate on and complete their musical piece.

A new musical concept that has yet to be put into practice can be considered a type of creative draft. If that idea is put into action, it can then become a musical piece, or even a production, given that it is performed and listened to by that same person or group.

Regardless of the complexity of the product (it could be a simple melody or a complete work), it can give the student the joy of having created and performed a piece of music, and, consequently, it can stimulate curiosity and a desire to learn more.

At times, music alludes to different notions. If we go back to the music of our ancestors, it is impossible to separate it from their daily activities, such as hunting, harvesting, or cooking. In addition to music produced for rituals and ceremonies, a combination of sounds could also have resulted from the constant and regular movement of ornaments and clothing during the hunt, of the tools of cultivation or harvesting, or of their cooking utensils.

Considering music as a wider concept, in our current daily lives we also create a diversity of sounds with our movements, steps and whistles, when we tap our wine glasses for a simple toast, or through the manipulation of equipment, electrical apparatuses, or by driving a car. On a daily basis, we combine these sounds during our activities as if they were a grand musical score orchestrated between man and nature. We could say that day-to-day we combine sounds and noises with or without pleasure. It is important to note that in a more or less artistic way, we all express ourselves in a grand musical composition by organizing noises (if they bother us) and sounds (if we find them pleasing).

Spontaneously and deliberately, we produce and listen to noises, sounds, and all types of music as both emitters and receptors. Animals also combine sounds on a daily basis, but our ability to organize sounds for utilitarian as well as artistic purposes is one of the things that separates humans from animals.

The organization of sound entered schools thanks to experiments by contemporary composers. John Milton Cage (1912–1992), for example, was a key composer and philosopher in the redefining of music in the 20th century. In his credo about music of the future, a lecture given in Seattle in 1937, Cage expressed the idea of transforming musical composition into an organization capable of combining sounds as well as silence and noise. According to Cage (1961), if we reserve the word music for the product of instruments produced in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, we should substitute that term for a more significant phrase: the organization of sound. During the second half of the 20th century, the idea of using activities geared towards the organization of sound and musical composition to learn music has been proposed by a variety of authors (including Delalande et al., 1984; Díaz Gómez & Frega, 1998; Díaz Gómez & Riaño Galán, 2007; Frega & Vaughan, 1980; Hemsy de Gainza, 1986; Murray Schafer, 1966, 1969; Saita, 1978). Regardless of the objective of music education, the joy of playing music and the desire to do so should begin with the human “universal behaviour” (conduits universelles) of combining sounds to learn how to organize them, how to understand their organization, and in doing so, acquire the cultural knowledge that belongs to the art of music, according to French authors Delalande, Vidal, and Reibel (1984). Moreover, the ways in which teachers may support students’ creative ideas across different creative practices (Burnard, 2012) and questions (“what if?” and “as if”) (Craft, 2008, 2010) are important. To see creativity as unproblematic, perhaps we need to develop the reflective teacher practices that encourage creative thinking in young students (Craft, 2010; Paige-Smith & Craft, 2011).

Aspects of traditional music also provide us with simple techniques of musical creation that we can use with children and adolescents. If we analyse certain traditional melodies, we can show that in different parts of the planet people have produced music with similar melodic scales, but using different rhythms. Pentatonic scales,² used all around the world, are an example of the rich acoustic convergence of peoples from different settings. We find an endless supply of traditional pentatonic melodies composed and transmitted from one generation to the next. Because of its basic acoustic structure, many cultures have used these scales at some point in their musical history. Still, the musical characteristics of these usages differ greatly. Combined with different durations and rhythms, the people of the world have achieved rich cultural divergences in music.

In the music classroom, the creation of pentatonic melodies with free rhythms allows students to produce music without the errors caused by tonal dissonances and without the obstacle of rhythmic formulas stressed only on the first beat.³ Traditionally, music education has been oriented towards the organization of technical knowledge concerning the reading of music on staves (sol-fa) and musical analysis (understanding the written symbols). Even active methodologies follow this orientation, organizing activities according to an order proposed by the theory first and then by the sol-fa, and not vice versa. This has produced an approach to teaching music that does not take into account the ways in which sounds are organized and the ways in which people express themselves musically and spontaneously outside of the classroom.

2. Ways of producing music

Obviously, we can produce music in different ways. Consequently, music education should also take into account the diversity of ways in which we create, play, and listen to music. Hargreaves, MacDonald, and Miell’s (2005) double pyramid model presents musical communication in the form of two large tetrahedrons joined in the musical process, one representing the musician and the other the response of the listener. On one side, music is composed and played in different situations and contexts, and concludes in a musical act, a performance. On the other, this musical act becomes music in different situations and contexts for the listener, who responds to the musician’s performance. Elliott (1995), in his pragmatic proposal concerning the philosophy of music education, separates the context of the musician from that of the listener. According to his model, both form part of a larger context. Still, these representations appear too simplistic if we consider them as only one-directional arrows moving from emitter to music and finally to the receptor. Considering musical expression as being unidirectional does not take into account that the receptor can also be a more or less active emitter and that the performer also needs to be an emitter and receptor at the same time. Additionally, through technology, both speech and music can be recorded and listened to later by means of a music player. For example, if we express ourselves musically or verbally with a group of people and record ourselves, we would be taking on at least three different roles: emitters, real-time receptors of the performance as it is being performed, and receptors in virtual time (afterwards, by listening to the recording). In other words, when we produce music, we can be both emitters and receptors at different times and in different places if our productions are recorded. Considering technological advances, we should rethink time and space in musical expression, and, consequently, in music education. Keeping in mind all of this complexity will allow us to design pedagogical objectives and activities in which students can identify with the multiple positions of emitters and receptors using a variety of spaces and considering time as real (as they play the music) and as virtual (during the creation of the score, the recording, our memories of them, etc.).

It is also evident that differing ways of producing music coexist. The most prevalent method involves collectives. For example, in institutional or religious music, all of the participants sing and a musician or a group of musicians accompany them. In concert halls, theatres, open spaces, and stadiums, music is generally produced frontally: in these concerts or recitals, the musicians face an audience of silent listeners (such as in academic music concerts) or an audience that claps, dances, and sings (such as in popular music recitals). In performances by orchestras or choirs, the musicians arrange themselves in a semicircle in front of the director. In contrast, when an ensemble or musical group creates, its members play and talk during their practice. They often arrange themselves in a circle or semicircle. When they record themselves, these groups form a semicircle around one or more microphones. Another traditional and popular method revolves around a centred person. This way of making music, often linked to dance, can also involve moving in and out of circles of people and the shifting of its members, such as in marches, carnivals, ceremonies, harvest and religious festivals, and even in gatherings of friends and family. Many of these approaches to making and producing music are rarely exploited in school activities. Music education cannot limit itself to the frontal method used in concert halls for classical music or to the collective approach used in religious services. In order to set the stage for musical activity in the classroom, music pedagogy should take into account the different ways of producing music individually or in groups. Perhaps schools have oversimplified the unidirectional model of musician–music–listener without thinking about the multidirectionality that exists in the many ways of organizing sound and making music. The teaching of music can benefit from opening itself up to these different methods of producing music by embracing certain musical activities that exist outside of the classroom.

3. Music and 11 to 13-year-old students

The age that interests us in this book encompasses the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, approximately between the ages of 11 and 13. At this age, both boys and girls enter a stage characterized by hybridization, multiculturalism, and style. The clothing, musical tastes, and slang of children in the North as well as in the South, in major cities as well as in small towns, slowly begin to change.

Currently, there exists a supposed fading of the inequalities between North and South, centres and peripheries, in an attempt to equalize these differences in a simplified vision of musical hybridity that seeks to maximize internet downloads and sell more and more CDs, movies, and television programs to youth all around the world (García Canclini, 2000). On the other hand, young people also now receive a heavy dose of media dedicated to music through soloist contests on reality TV programs (interactive reality talent shows)⁴ in which a group of adolescents compete to continue their dreams of being professional singers. Each year, the program begins with a large group of candidates and whittles them down to a single winner. These TV shows began at the end of the 20th century and have been slowly falling in popularity since. On these programs, young people can observe live on television or on the internet not only the processes of individual or group singing, theatre, or dance classes, but also the individual commentaries of each contestant.

At the beginning of this century, rap music and hip hop culture have also become an important influence in the lives of the young, just as rock became an identity and its own culture for teenagers in the 1960s. Like rock, the diversity of music styles derived from rap have spread throughout youth culture. These styles have turned into musical expression for some and for many they generated trends in the way that young people speak and how they dress.

In addition to the impact of the music industry, reality TV, fashion, and trends, new technologies have also influenced the relationship between young people and music. In recent years, these technologies have revolutionized how the young communicate with each other and how they relate to music. Today’s youth can now download music and ringtones for their cell phones. The majority of these cell phones can exchange or record sounds and images, with which we can orchestrate a musical sequence simply by adding or removing drums, an electric guitar, or a keyboard. We can even compose and orchestrate our own melodies on them. These technological possibilities are not only open to an elite group of the young. I myself observed in the outskirts of Buenos Aires how poverty-stricken children who beg for money know how to manipulate cell phones (recycled or stolen) in order to record sounds, film images, write a text message with spellcheck, and use the phone’s calculator. It is incredible that schools cannot find ways to use these technological resources to teach these children how to calculate, write, film, and photograph.

In her analysis of art and youth culture, Beatriz Sarlo (1996) explains that the equality that one seems to find in youth culture is limited by social, racial, sexual, and moral prejudices. Perhaps we should add to these cultural (and musical) prejudices influenced by fashion, reality TV, commercial music, counter-culture, and the use of new technologies. Are these prejudices an obstacle to composing and collaborating on music? Culture can be a channel for creativity, especially if it influences the creative productions of our young students in terms of the forms of creativity they choose, the cultural acts involved in the nature of their creativity, the creative process of their social groups, or their fashion acts (Lubart, 2009). “Creativity is not a solitary process” (Valsiner et al., 2015, Chapter XV–XXII, p. XX). From a cultural perspective, according to Glăveanu (2010, 2011, 2014), the importance of creativity is a “psycho-socio-cultural” phenomenon in the daily lives of people. Youth can produce music in groups without difficulty, including when they are allowed to create without teachers offering their own ideas. In both the cultural activities that I organized in outlying neighbourhoods⁵ and a variety of musical workshops that I set up for children,⁶ I was able to prove that children and teenagers, despite their differences, are capable of organizing themselves to create a short piece of music. This was made possible by my pedagogical support, but without my creative input as to how they should complete or better what they had produced. If they needed help in reaching their goals, they sought out my advice.

Barth’s (2004a) description of the intellectual activity in a building game chosen by a child is well suited to illustrate these types of situations. According to Barth (2004a), during a self-guided activity, children or adolescents:

[ … ] have an idea of what they want to do; they have a goal at the beginning and plan on achieving it as they always do [ … ]. They explore the many possibilities, and restart without tiring. Difficulty stimulates them [ … ]. If they need supplementary information, they’ll know what to ask. We do not impose any information on them that they cannot understand, and they retain that which makes sense to them. Their thoughts are spontaneous, tied to action and their goals. Their objectives are clear to them, and generally if they were not, the students would not have even conceived of them. These objectives build on previous experiences, on what they already know. The setting can respond to their petitions, if they want it to [ … ]. If they make a mistake along the way, they do not punish themselves. On the contrary, their errors guide them. They are not afraid of failing. They know when they have been successful and they experiment with great pleasure. They can even, at any given moment, decide that their goals are not doable because they do not have certain abilities or objects. But this failure is not comparable to failure in school in which children do not understand why they could not do something or what it was that they needed to do.

(p. 28, the translation is mine)

Even with the current commercial bombardment that teenagers undergo, when we ask them to create music, we give them an opportunity to reinvent, in a variety of ways, their relationship with music (and musics). I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Towards a “Socio-Creative” Approach to Education from the Field of Music
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction or Prelude
• Part I: – First Movement: Music, Creativity, Collaboration, and Reflection in the Classroom
• Part II: – Second Movement: The Development of a Pedagogy in Different Educational Contexts
• Part III: – Third Movement: When Creative Collaboration Changes Teaching
• Notes
• Curricula
• References
• A List of Collaborators and Supporters
• Index