Uncoverage

It’s January, and I’m sure all of us are busily preparing for the Spring 2013 semester, if our semester hasn’t already started. I am teaching courses this Spring I have taught several times before, and so I’m trying to shake things up a little bit, for my sake as well as for my students’. I am excited by the idea of incorporating more writing into my courses, and figuring out assignments that will deepen my students’ involvement with the material we are covering. They may not appreciate the extra writing they will have to do, but I have goals. I want them to “learn the history,” of course, but I also want them to think about how the music we are studying from the past and the broader issues involved in this music can be meaningful for them outside of the music history classroom. I worry about how superficial most of their learning really is!

To address these issues, however, takes time - both my preparation time and actual classroom time - commodities of which I and many other junior faculty members have little. Something needs to give, and it takes an act of faith and even bravery to make the commitment to following a path that is going to require compromises with the standard model of music history teaching. I feel that now is the time to try this out – I’ll write over the semester on what I am trying and how it is all going!

It was refreshing, then, to read Melanie Lowe’s description of her personal struggles to break with her own mentoring models in teaching and come to terms with her own pedagogical voice by realizing that sometimes she needed to do LESS. I find Lowe’s tale of liberation extremely validating to discovering my own pedagogical voice as a “bad” teacher, an ambivalent rebel against long-standing ideas of what it means to be a good musicologist at the expense of being an effective teacher.

In her article "Teaching Music History Today" Lowe defines two fundamental challenges that resonate strongly as I have been thinking through the coming semester’s course schedules. The first is to resist the pressure, implicit and explicit, to “cover it all” in a music history survey – something we might call the “full coverage model of music” history. Instead, we might borrow from E. Shelley Reid, who calls for an “uncoverage model” in her essay “Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy.” (E. Shelley Reid, “Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy,” Composition Studies 32/1 (2004):15-34)  While Reid is addressing teachers of introductory courses to the teaching of writing, many of her points are extremely valid for any sort of introductory course, music history included. At one point in her article she says, “As we develop and improve courses …then, I argue that we need—very deliberately, publicly, and collectively—to focus on uncoverage, to emphasize discoveries that lead to long-term learning over immediate competencies. That is… as an intellectual engagement rather than an inoculation, as practice in a way of encountering the world rather than mastery of skills or facts, as preparation for a lifetime of thinking.” (20) She goes on to argue that, “deliberate uncoverage pedagogies help us resist by foregrounding Donald Schön’s reflection-in-action as a goal…this is equally as valuable as the goals of schema and repertoire that a coverage-based (model) provides.” (20) Schemas in this sense are basically learned patterns we use over and over again to help us to understand new experiences and encounters, and repertoires are behaviors that have worked in the past in such situations. The issue is the extent to which these responses become fixed and rigid

             For me, reading Reid validates my idea that doing less might actually have value for my students and might heighten the kinds of learning that might happen in my classroom. Shelley advocates for a classroom situation where the kinds of learning are broad-based, focused not only on the transmission of schema and repertoire (and the dual sense of this word for music history professors is particularly appropriate!), but also the exploration of how aspects explored in the classroom can be brought into the student’s outside world, both critically and ethically.

            More on Melanie Lowe’s article coming up!

Do you ever struggle with the balance between covering the material you feel you need to teach, and the urge to cover less to make time and space for deeper encounters? How do you deal with this juggling act?