Week 6 Reflection - Responding to Music

This chapter discussed the ways in which people respond to music. The content that focused on the difference between hearing music and listening to music was interesting to me. Hearing music is simply the basic awareness of sounds around you. Listening to music is the attentiveness to those sounds and making meaning out of them (Bauer, 2014, p. 107). Bauer (p.107) also mentions that listening to music is contextual in that music listening is usually done while performing some other activity such as driving the car, or doing household chores. I remember back in the first week of class when we had to conduct interviews with our students and peers about their use of technology. Most of my students mentioned that they used their devices primarily for social networking but secondly for listening to music. Every student mentioned that they like to listen to music while they are performing some other task.

                The blog that I user for this class, www.herrerachoralprogram.blogspot.com is my actual classroom website. Before this class, this website rarely was utilized and was there for parents to look at if they ever felt inclined to do so. Through this course I have generated some ideas about how to use the blog to the advantage of my students in the future. Bauer (2014, p. 112) suggest that teachers could create playlists for students to listen to while they are out of school. Since a lot of music listening is done in conjunction with something else, I could encourage the students to play the music from the prescribed playlist while they are performing some other task. When the discussion occurs in class about the music they heard, perhaps the students will be more open to discuss their observations of the music itself.

                Reading the remainder of chapter five, I appreciated that Bauer not only emphasized the use of technology, but he discussed ways in which this technology can be applied in the classroom. For instance, Bauer discusses the two standard ways to conceptualize the nature of knowledge; declarative, and procedural (2014, p. 115). Focused more on the declarative side of knowledge, Bauer laid out methods in which technology can be used to facilitate this type of knowledge in the classroom setting. Not only that, he was also very specific with the types of music content he presented using this technology for. After reading this chapter, I feel like I am walking away with several new ideas for music lessons in my class. I also feel like that I have some general ideas on the methods I would use to present this content and make my lessons more students drive and teacher facilitated.

Reference

Bauer, W.I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.