The challenge this week was to think about incorporating
multimodal assignments into the classroom. Our readings, of course, were
targeted towards the writing
composition classroom, and as such offer a variety of justifications for
including multimodal composition alongside alphabetic composition, most of
which seem to highlight the advantages of pushing students to think and act
rhetorically outside the traditional comfort zone of written text.
From
the perspective of the music history classroom, however, the situation is
reversed. Instead of considering how to move composition assignments away from
text-based activities towards developing a competence with multi-modal ones,
musicology professors deal with students often well-versed in the multi-modal
arenas of music, dance, and performance and who must instead be challenged to
learn about music from the perspective of text and text-based information. As
well, as an historical discipline, music history demands that connections
between abstract information and sounding music itself are forged. Making these
connections is often difficult for students, as is the production of a written
document that offers description, analysis, and synthesis around a work involving
other modalities. The music history classroom can become a stressful
environment as activities involving reading, writing, and other book-based
learning that must be confronted within the traditional writing assignment.
Like
Takayoshi and Selfe in our readings for today, I do not advocate doing away
totally with the written essay as an important product for music students – it
is already a multimodal activity for them to attempt to explicate music through
text, whether that is descriptive, analytical and historical, and in many ways
creating a formal writing assignment is one of the best ways to get them to
learn to choose points, structure those points into a coherent framework, and
practice description and analysis. But I do think it would be a good challenge
for me as a teacher to allow them to work in media other than alphabetic text
in an attempt to validate skills they have in these areas that are often not
credited in the music history classroom. As well, more and more music is
disseminated and explicated on the web, and students should be able to feel
that they could contribute to these environments for music outside tradition
written music criticism, and are given some practice in some of the skills they
might need to do this kind of work and the opportunity to consider some of the
issues involved.
Despite
some of my reservations – I myself do not feel at ease yet with various kinds
of multi-modal production involving the manipulation of visual images, audio
and video, and so I worry that I will not be able to give students the help
they need to do these kinds of assignments – I am willing to give it a try. So
in my Music History I survey class next semester I am going to assign a
multi-modal project.
The
class covers the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods and certainly most
of my students know little of Medieval and Renaissance music. They find it
difficult to understand and they struggle to create a useful historical context
for the music. Though we cover visual iconography and primary sources in the
class, they have a hard time connecting that material to what they hear and the
more abstract information contained in their textbook. So I thought I would ask
my students to create a multimodal presentation around a piece from the Medieval
or Renaissance period, linking visual images and text to a performance of the
piece. Images could include artworks from the period, examples of visual
iconography, photographs of places or architecture, and/or still or video clips
from performances. Texts could include excerpts from primary sources,
manuscripts, contemporary analysis, or other writings. The idea is that the
students would produce a storyboard for a video that would present their chosen
visuals and text excerpts while an audio track of the music was running behind,
a historical and/or associative digital story with sounding music at its core. If
they wish (or if I feel that most of the class can do this easily) students can
produce their videos. As well, students will need to include a written
explanation of how the images and texts relate to the piece they have chosen.
Assessment
is always difficult, but I think I will provide a rubric that emphasizes
evaluation based on the relevance of the chosen material to the piece and the
extent to which the visual component of the story can be seen as an appropriate
creation of a context for the work.
The purpose of the assignment is to give
the students the opportunity to produce a virtual contextual space for a
musical work that they construct for themselves. This should allow us to
discuss the elements of choice when it comes to making those kinds of
contextual connections, and relate it to the more abstract “spaces” created in
alphabetical texts. Finally, it should give students who feel more comfortable
with non-alphabetic production the opportunity to tackle issues of historical context in ways
that highlight these strengths yet still forces them to deal with the creation
of context from unfamiliar and strange-to-them sources.
I’ll
see how it goes!........
