Teaching with Technology

New technologies offer exciting possibilities for transforming music education curricula. Often, music education classes tend to employ a traditionalist, teacher-centered triad of lecture, reading, and discussion. Music educators in higher education argue that current computer technology can make music teacher education more practical by employing student-centered “constructivist” pedagogy with readily accessible resources and multiple alternate sources of information. The article I chose to read this week is about enhancing music teacher education using the internet and it is to report how a technology-assisted, constructivist approach enhanced graduate courses in the history and philosophy of music education offered by two geographically distanced universities.

Pedagogical strategies advocated by constructivists appear to share a common core of distinctive characteristics. Such characteristics may include student-centered construction of understanding, integration of prior knowledge and experiences, reflective practice, a project or activity approach, and often cooperative or collaborative learning. The authors started a project based on this constructivist pedagogy approach to investigate the outcomes of music education students’ e-learning experiences.

The Project: An Overview

Students enrolled in graduate classes in the history and philosophy of music education at two universities collaborated in learning projects via Internet-based technologies. The goal of the collaboration was to provide students with additional experiences and insights not typically afforded by the traditional graduate music education classroom. The students had an electronic discussion forum on various musical topics and the instructors did not directly participate in these discussions. As time went on, students were more fully engaged in discussion and contributed extra work beside their course requirements.

Project Assessment

Overall, the students were positive regarding many aspects of the collaboration. They liked the asynchronous nature of the on-line activities. They felt that the Web site development project was worth-while. They felt that the dialog with the students at other university broadened their course experience, and they expressed interest in taking other courses that used Internet-based technologies as part of the instructional process.

Students were relatively neutral toward other parts of the experience. They did not necessarily think that the on-line responses of their colleagues had any more depth or focus than if they had been given in a traditional class discussion. In addition, students generally expressed neutral opinions with respect to comfort levels in communicating with their instructor and other students electronically.

Students disagreed with one statement on the questionnaire. Overall, they indicated that they would not like to take a course that was conducted entirely over the Internet. While the students had stated a desire for courses that included Internet-based technologies as part of the instructional process, they appeared to value aspects of the traditional classroom as well. It may be that the Internet can be most effectively used with some students as an additional method of learning, enhancing, and supplementing traditional classroom activities.

The authors state that as the Internet becomes ubiquitous, music educators need to explore possibilities for utilizing this resource to help students learn. The Internet allows music teacher educators to expand their horizon of students beyond a single classroom, breaking down traditional time and distance constraints. The best way for students to gain appropriate technological skills is for them to experience and use technology, not under a separate agenda, but as part of their own knowledge construction. And it is teacher’s responsibility to guide students to technologically equipped musician/teacher.

William I. Bauer and James F. Daugherty (2001), Using the internet to enhance music teacher education.

Journal of Music Teacher Education 2001;11;27